The effects of invertebrate herbivores on plant population growth: a meta-regression analysis

Over the last two decades, an increasing number of studies have quantified the effects of herbivory on plant populations using stage-structured population models and integral projection models, allowing for the calculation of plant population growth rates (λ) with and without herbivory. In this paper, I assembled 29 studies and conducted a meta-regression to determine the importance of invertebrate herbivores to population growth rates (λ) while accounting for missing data. I found that invertebrate herbivory often induced important reductions in plant population growth rates (with herbivory, λ was 1.08 ± 0.36; without herbivory, λ was 1.28 ± 0.58). This relationship tended to be weaker for seed predation than for other types of herbivory, except when seed predation rates were very high. Even so, the amount by which studies reduced herbivory was a poor predictor of differences in population growth rates—which strongly cautions against using measured herbivory rates as a proxy for the impact of herbivores. Herbivory reduced plant population growth rates significantly more when potential growth rates were high, which helps to explain why there was less variation in actual population growth rates than in potential population growth rates. The synthesis of these studies also shows the need for future studies to report variance in estimates of λ and to quantify how λ varies as a function of plant density.