Peer review process
Not revised: This Reviewed Preprint includes the authors’ original preprint (without revision), an eLife assessment, and public reviews.
Read more about eLife’s peer review process.Editors
- Reviewing EditorDavid DonosoNational Polytechnic School, Quito, Ecuador
- Senior EditorMeredith SchumanUniversity of Zurich, Zürich, Switzerland
Reviewer #1 (Public Review):
This study reports a long-term, multisite study of tropical herbivory on Piper plants. The results are clear that lack of water leads to lower plant survival and altered herbivory. The results varied substantially among sites. The caveats are that ecosystem processes beyond water availability are not investigated although they are brought into play in the title and in the paper, that herbivory beyond leaf damage was not reported (there might be none, the reader needs to be shown the evidence for this), that herbivore diversity is defined by leaf damage (authors need to give evidence that this is a valid inference), that the plots were isolated from herbivores beyond their borders, that the effects of extreme climate events were isolated to Peru, that intraspecific variation in the host plants needs to be explained and interpreted in more detail, the results as reported are extremely complicated, the discussion is overly long and diffuse.
Reviewer #2 (Public Review):
This is an important and large experimental study examining the effects of plant species richness, plant genotypic richness, and soil water availability on herbivory patterns on Piper species in tropical forests.
A major strength is the size of the study and the fact that it tackled so many potentially important factors simultaneously. The authors examined both interspecific plant diversity and intraspecific plant diversity. They crossed that with a water availability treatment. And they repeated the experiment across five geographically separated sites.
The authors find that both water availability and plant diversity, intraspecific and interspecific, influence herbivore diversity and herbivory, but that the effects differ in important ways across sites. I found the study to be solid and the results to be very convincing. The results will help the field grapple with the importance of environmental change and biodiversity loss and how they structure communities and alter species interactions.
