Herbert Nickel

The global distribution of diet breadth in insect herbivores

Significance Dietary specialization determines an organism’s resource base as well as impacts on host or prey species. There are important basic and applied reasons to ask why some animals have narrow diets and others are more generalized, and if different regions of the Earth support more specialized interactions. We investigated site-specific host records for more than 7,500 species of insect herbivores. Although host specialists predominate, the proportion of specialists is affected by the diversity of hosts and shifts globally, supporting predictions of more exclusive tropical interactions. These results not only affect our understanding of the ecology of food webs, but also have implications for how they respond to environmental change, as well as for ecosystem management and restoration. Understanding variation in resource specialization is important for progress on issues that include coevolution, community assembly, ecosystem processes, and the latitudinal gradient of species richness. Herbivorous insects are useful models for studying resource specialization, and the interaction between plants and herbivorous insects is one of the most common and consequential ecological associations on the planet. However, uncertainty persists regarding fundamental features of herbivore diet breadth, including its relationship to latitude and plant species richness. Here, we use a global dataset 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. We 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. Across geographic regions and taxonomic subsets of the data, we find that the distribution of diet breadth is fit well by a discrete, truncated Pareto power law characterized by the predominance of specialized herbivores and a long, thin tail of more generalized species. Both the taxonomic and phylogenetic distributions of diet breadth shift globally with latitude, consistent with a higher frequency of specialized insects in tropical regions. We also find that more diverse lineages of plants support assemblages of relatively more specialized herbivores and that the global distribution of plant diversity contributes to but does not fully explain the latitudinal gradient in insect herbivore specialization.

Conservation of grassland leafhoppers: a brief review

The leafhoppers, planthoppers and their allies (collectively known as the Auchenorrhyncha) are presented as a group of insects that are highly appropriate for studying grassland ecology and conservation, evaluating the conservation status of sites and monitoring environmental and habitat change. Semi-natural grasslands typically support dense populations and a wide range of species with diverse ecological strategies. Their numerical dominance in many grasslands means that they have considerable functional significance, both as herbivores and as prey for higher trophic levels. Population and assemblage studies are supported by good ecological knowledge about most species and modern identification keys. Hitherto, most studies have focused on the composition and structure of assemblages and how they are affected by conservation management. However, grasslands support many rare species with small and fragmented populations which deserve conservation attention in their own right, and recent work has started to reflect this. The effects of management on the composition and structure of grassland leafhopper populations and assemblages are described and an assessment is given of the main threats facing individual species and overall diversity. There is a need to synthesise the scattered literature on grassland leafhoppers, to provide a model for how the composition and structure of populations and assemblages respond to major environmental and anthropogenic gradients across large biogeographic areas. Such an analysis could help predict the impact of likely future changes in land use and climate.

Rote Liste und Gesamtartenliste der Zikaden (Hemiptera: Fulgoromorpha und Cicadomorpha)

[Red List and checklist of the planthoppers and leafhoppers of Berlin] We present, for the first time, a Red List of the planthoppers and leafhoppers of the federal state of Berlin, as well as an updated checklist. Altogether 337 species have been recorded so far, 39 of them are considered as regionally extinct (category 0), 25 as critically endangered (category 1), 5 as endangered (category 2), 15 as vulnerable (category 3), 20 as indeterminate (category G), 14 rare (category R), 12 near-threatened (category V). The data base is deficient (category D) for 14 further species. Berlin is assigned a particular responsibility for conservation of Cicadula ornata, Anoplotettix fuscovenosus and Pinumius areatus. The first two species are in Germany so far only known from Berlin. For the latter species most recent German records are from Berlin.