PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Danielle M. Salcido
AU  - Matthew Forister
AU  - Humberto Garcia Lopez
AU  - Lee A. Dyer
TI  - Ecosystem services at risk from declining taxonomic and interaction diversity in a tropical forest
AID  - 10.1101/631028
DP  - 2019 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 631028
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/05/08/631028.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/05/08/631028.full
AB  - Reports of biodiversity loss have increasingly focused on the abundance and diversity of insects, but it has been less clear if substantive losses are occurring in intact low-latitude forests. We collected 22 years of plant-caterpillar-parasitoid data in a protected tropical forest and found reductions in diversity and density of these insects that appear to be partly driven by a changing climate and weather anomalies. The decline in parasitism represents a reduction in an important ecosystem service: enemy control of primary consumers. The consequences of these changes are in many cases irreversible and will likely negatively impact surrounding agriculture. The decline of important tropical taxa and associated ecosystem function underlines the apparent threat to global insect diversity and provides additional impetus for research on tropical diversity.One Sentence Summary Tropical insect diversity and populations densities are declining in response to climate change, resulting in loss of ecosystem function.