Ivone Rezende Diniz

TL;DR: A global dataset is used to investigate host range for over 7,500 insect herbivore species covering a wide taxonomic breadth and interacting with more than 2,000 species of plants in 165 families to ask whether relatively specialized and generalized herbivores represent a dichotomy rather than a continuum from few to many host families and species attacked and whether diet breadth changes with increasing plant species richness toward the tropics.

TL;DR: It is suggested that greater specialization in tropical faunas is the result of differences in trophic interactions; for example, there are more distinct plant secondary chemical profiles from one tree species to the next in tropical forests than in temperate forests as well as more diverse and chronic pressures from natural enemy communities.

TL;DR: This work compares caterpillar-parasitoid interactions across a broad gradient of climatic variability and finds that the combined data in 15 geographically dispersed databases show a decrease in levels of parasitism as Climatic variability increases.

TL;DR: The high richness of relatively rare species in the cerrado site poses challenges in understanding the reasons for such rarity, the organization of such assemblages, the gradient of species richness from low to high latitudes, the estimation of biodiversity, and conservation management.

TL;DR: Plant and leaf traits were correlated with interspecific variation in attack by herbivores and pathogens in order to account for differences among plant species, and protein availability and plant height were positive predictors of pathogen attack among plant Species, while leaf expansion rate was a significant negative predictor.