Environmental and Genetic Effects of Elevation on Plant Defense

Abstract

Plant communities are shaped by their interactions with biotic and abiotic factors in their environment, including herbivores. In response to pressures from herbivores, plants develop a variety of physical and chemical defenses to protect themselves. The investment that plants make in these defenses varies with the environment. Using fully reciprocal turf transplants at three different elevations and a variety of focal plant species, we tested patterns of plant defense against herbivory along elevational gradients and examined whether any intra-specific variation in plant defense is due to genetic variation among populations and/or are changed by the environment of the plant. After collecting leaves in the field and conducting grasshopper feeding bioassays, our experiment did not find any significant effect of treatments in either the environmental or the genetic tests. This result contradicts previous work done at RMBL and in other study systems. One possible explanation for this is that our elevational gradient was not large enough to see noticeable differences in plant defense. Another possible explanation is that it was a very low year for grasshopper abundance and it’s possible they had a disease or parasite that was causing changes to their eating patterns. Further experiments are required to draw conclusions about genetic and environmental effects on plant defense.

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