Forest loss increases insect herbivory levels in human-altered landscapes

•Herbivory may be affected by habitat loss, possibly due to changes in top-down and/or bottom-up efects.•Herbivory rates on a representative understory family increased with habitat loss in a Brazilian Atlantic Forest landscape.•Neither top-down nor bottom-up effects explained the patterns in herbivory.•We showed a clear relation between forest cover and herbivory rates,but the specific mechanisms remain unclear.

Insect herbivory has been observed to be affected by habitat loss and fragmentation, although the mechanisms by which these anthropogenic disturbances affect this process are not well understood. To aid in clarifying this issue, we assessed the relation between forest cover and leaf damage caused by herbivorous insects on a representative tropical forest understory plant family, the Rubiaceae. We measured leaf area loss of Rubiaceae plants in 20 forest sites located in the Brazilian Atlantic forest, and also tested whether variation in forest cover, abundance of insectivorous birds (predators) and of Rubiaceae plants (resources) could explain the observed variation in leaf damage. Herbivory levels varied between 2.6 and 12.5 percent leaf area lost and increased with decreasing forest cover, whereas the other explanatory variables did not provide additional explanatory power. Therefore, forest loss appears to be the main driver of changes in local herbivory, and ecological processes such as top-down and bottom-up control may not account for the deforestation-related increase in herbivory levels. Other mechanisms, for example leaf quality and/or the influence of the adjoining land uses, have to be explored in future studies.