Plant and insect herbivore community variation across the Paleocene-Eocene boundary in the Hanna Basin, southeastern Wyoming.

Regan E Dunn,Ellen D Currano,Marieke Dechesne,Jason Mercer,Lauren E Azevedo Schmidt

doi:10.7717/peerj.7798

Abstract

Ecosystem function and stability are highly affected by internal and external stressors. Utilizing paleobotanical data gives insight into the evolutionary processes an ecosystem undergoes across long periods of time, allowing for a more complete understanding of how plant and insect herbivore communities are affected by ecosystem imbalance. To study how plant and insect herbivore communities change during times of disturbance, we quantified community turnover across the Paleocene–Eocene boundary in the Hanna Basin, southeastern Wyoming. This particular location is unlike other nearby Laramide basins because it has an abundance of late Paleocene and Eocene coal and carbonaceous shales and paucity of well-developed paleosols, suggesting perpetually high water availability. We sampled approximately 800 semi-intact dicot leaves from five stratigraphic levels, one of which occurs late in the Paleocene–Eocene thermal maximum (PETM). Field collections were supplemented with specimens at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science. Fossil leaves were classified into morphospecies and herbivore damage was documented for each leaf. We tested for changes in plant and insect herbivore damage diversity using rarefaction and community composition using non-metric multidimensional scaling ordinations. We also documented changes in depositional environment at each stratigraphic level to better contextualize the environment of the basin. Plant diversity was highest during the mid-late Paleocene and decreased into the Eocene, whereas damage diversity was highest at the sites with low plant diversity. Plant communities significantly changed during the late PETM and do not return to pre-PETM composition. Insect herbivore communities also changed during the PETM, but, unlike plant communities, rebound to their pre-PETM structure. These results suggest that insect herbivore communities responded more strongly to plant community composition than to the diversity of species present.

Highlights

Many modern ecological studies focus on how ecosystems will adapt over the 100 years as anthropogenic climate change continues to alter terrestrial ecosystems, oftentimes faster than plants and insects can adapt (Parmesan, 2006; Anderson, Panetta & Mitchell-Olds, 2012; Midgley & Bond, 2015)
The paleoenvironments preserved within the Hanna Basin allow for a comparison of changes to floral and insect herbivore communities during a time of highly variable global climate
In this study we found that plant and insect herbivore diversity, along with community composition, did not track one another; changes in both plant and insect community composition and structure coincide with the Paleocene–Eocene thermal maximum (PETM) event

Summary

Introduction

Many modern ecological studies focus on how ecosystems will adapt over the 100 years as anthropogenic climate change continues to alter terrestrial ecosystems, oftentimes faster than plants and insects can adapt (Parmesan, 2006; Anderson, Panetta & Mitchell-Olds, 2012; Midgley & Bond, 2015). Following the Cretaceous bolide impact, ecosystem function was highly variable among regions, as terrestrial plant and insect communities experienced rebound (Vajda, Raine & Hollis, 2001; Ellis, Johnson & Dunn, 2003; Wilf et al, 2006; Iglesias et al, 2007; Wappler et al, 2009; Donovan et al, 2016) This instability continued for the duration of the Paleocene in western North America, as evidenced by inconsistencies in plant vs insect herbivore diversity (Wilf et al, 2006). The PETM transformed terrestrial ecosystems in many ways, including the alteration and intensification of hydrologic cycles (Schmitz & Pujalte, 2007; Handley et al, 2008; Kraus et al, 2013), an increase in sedimentary flow rates and change in depositional systems (Foreman, Heller & Clementz, 2012), turnover in abundant plant species (Smith, Wing & Freeman, 2007; Wing & Currano, 2013; Garel et al, 2014), and increased insect herbivory (Currano et al, 2008, 2016)

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