1  HerbVar Overview

Welcome to HerbVar! We are a collaborative network of researchers interested in understanding how plant–herbivore interactions vary across plant species around the globe. Most of the field’s current understanding of large-scale patterns in herbivory and plant–herbivore interactions come from studies focused on average levels of herbivory. We aim to advance our fundamental understanding of plant–herbivore interactions by quantifying variation in patterns of plant–herbivore interactions within and across sites.

1.1 Project Goals

  • To gather standardized data on the distribution of herbivory on individual plants within populations for species and sites across the globe.
  • To promote the use of HerbVar data to generate testable hypotheses and publications that advance our fundamental and applied understanding of the role of variability and distributions in plant–herbivore interactions.
  • To develop theory and statistical tools for studying the role of distributions in plant-herbivore interactions.
  • To engage researchers globally and across career stages and backgrounds in collaborative science.
  • To increase awareness of and education about the importance of variability in biological processes at graduate and undergraduate levels.

1.2 Motivation

Published studies and personal observations suggest the distribution of herbivore feeding damage among individual plants within a population is often highly skewed such that most plants and plant parts (leaves, reproductive structures, etc.) experience relatively low levels of damage, and a small fraction of plants experience disproportionately high levels of damage. Theory suggests that such variability can have dramatic ecological and evolutionary consequences. For example, variability among plants can lead overall herbivore population size to be greater or less than expected based on average plant quality and asymmetric fitness surfaces can lead to over-investment in defensive traits. Surprisingly, despite the established theoretical importance and potential generality of variability in herbivory, it has received little empirical attention, limiting our fundamental understanding of how plants and herbivores interact.

1.3 Getting Involved

All professionally-trained researchers with expertise in plant-herbivore interactions are welcome to join HerbVar as a member. We ask members to read this manual before reaching out about joining. Once you have decided to join, please email to get the process started. Members can get involved in the network in four main ways:

  1. Become a Site PI by collecting data using one of the HerbVar Protocols described in this manual. Submit data towards a sampling objective and become a co-author on a publication resulting from that sampling objective (see Chapter 5 and Chapter 7).

  2. Propose a new Working Group. Working Groups analyze and publish existing data, design and coordinate new add-on data collection efforts, and develop educational resources with HerbVar data (see Section 6.1).

  3. Join an existing Working Group open to new members. See the Working Groups page of our website for a list of our Working Groups.

  4. Propose a new add-on data collection effort to have Site PIs collect data you would like to analyze and publish (see Chapter 9).

This manual explains the process for each of these ways of getting involved.

1.4 Questions?

More information on the HerbVar Project is available on the project website. If you can’t find the information you’re looking for in this manual or the website, please contact one of the HerbVar PIs or a member of the HerbVar Steering Committee (see Chapter 2 for their contact information).