Data from: Plant diversity enhances moth diversity in an intensive forest management experiment

Intensive forest management (IFM) promises to help satisfy increasing global demand for wood, but may come at the cost of local reductions to forest biodiversity. IFM often reduces early seral plant diversity as a result of efforts to eliminate plant competition with crop trees. If diversity is a function of bottom-up drivers, theory predicts that specialists at lower trophic levels (e.g., insect herbivores) should be particularly sensitive to reductions in plant diversity. We conducted a stand-level experiment to test bottom-up controls on moth community structure, as mediated by degrees of forest management intensity. Using a dataset of 12,003 moths representing 316 moth species, moth richness decreased only slightly, if at all, as herbicide intensity increased (P = 0.062); the 'moderate' treatment, which is most commonly applied in the northwestern USA, was estimated to have 4.72 (± 2.14 SE, P =0.039) fewer species than the control. Structural equation modeling revealed strong support for an effect of herbicide on plant abundance, which influenced plant species richness and subsequently moth species richness. Moth species richness was associated with plant species richness and followed a power law function (z=0.42, P =0.006), which is surprisingly consistent with a recent large-scale experiment in agricultural systems, and provides support for bottom-up drivers of moth community structure. Moth abundance was not influenced by the direct effects of silvicultural herbicide treatments. Site-level effects and variation in pre-harvest vegetation communities resulted in residual broadleaf and herbaceous vegetation in even the most intensive treatment. Even at low densities, these residual deciduous and herbaceous plants supported higher-than-expected moth abundance and richness. We conclude that forest management practices that retain early seral vegetation diversity are the most likely to conserve moth communities.Metadata and Data for Root et al. Ecological ApplicationsRoot et al. 2016 Ecological Applications Metadata 6 tables are associated with this study MothCommunities2012.csv and MothCommunities2013.csv include moth community data. Preliminary column names are self-evident and include the units. "richness" is the species richness of moths sampled, and the "totabund" is the total abundance of moths sampled. Following columns are for each moth species headed by their scientific names, and numbers represent the count sampled. MothSpeciesTraits.csv includes the characteristics of the moths. The first column, "Sci" is the scientific name of the moth with genus.species. "family" includes the family names, and "FamShort" is the abbreviated family name. "specialist" refers to whether the species specializes on one family of plants or many families of plants (then considered a "generalist"). "FineFeed" includes the family of plants for specialist feeders. "CoarseFeed" is the coarse feeding group and includes hardwoods, herbs, grasses, conifers, lichens and ferns. "Total" is the total abundance of that species in the dataset. "Control", "light", "moderate", and "intensive" are the abundances in each treatment. PlantCommunity.csv includes the plant community data. "standyear" includes the name of the stand with a "." separating it from the sampling year. Acronyms for each plant species are the headers for all other columns. Numbers represent the average cover in quadrats in each stand by year combination. PlantCategories.csv includes the category of plants used for analysis. The "Plants" column has the acronyms used in "PlantCommunity.csv". The "Group" has the category for each plant, including Coni (conifer), Hdwd (hardwood), Fern, Forbes (herbaceous non-graminoids), and grass (graminoids). StandCovariates.csv has the characteristics of the stands. Column names should be self-evident and include corrdinates, elevation, area, aspect, slope, and blocks.Ecol Apps data to archive.zipFunding provided by: National Science FoundationCrossref Funder Registry ID: http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/100000001Award Number: AFRI-2009-04457, AFRI-2015‐67019‐2317