Anthropogenic climate warming affects plant communities by changing community structure and function. Studies on climate warming have primarily focused on individual effects of warming, but the interactive effects of warming with biotic factors could be at least as important in community responses to climate change. In addition, climate change experiments spanning multiple years are necessary to capture interannual variability and detect the influence of these effects within ecological communities. Our study explores the individual and interactive effects of warming and insect herbivory on plant traits and community responses within a 7‐year warming and herbivory manipulation experiment in two early successional plant communities in Michigan, USA. We find stronger support for the individual effects of both warming and herbivory on multiple plant morphological and phenological traits; only the timing of plant green‐up and seed set demonstrated an interactive effect between warming and herbivory. With herbivory, warming advanced green‐up, but with reduced herbivory, there was no significant effect of warming. In contrast, warming increased plant biomass, but the effect of warming on biomass did not depend upon the level of insect herbivores. We found that these treatments had stronger effects in some years than others, highlighting the need for multiyear experiments. This study demonstrates that warming and herbivory can have strong direct effects on plant communities, but that their interactive effects are limited in these early successional systems. Because the strength and direction of these effects can vary by ecological context, it is still advisable to include levels of biotic interactions, multiple traits and years, and community type when studying climate change effects on plants and their communities.

中文翻译：

---

植物群落对多年气候变暖和食草的个体和交互影响的反应


人为气候变暖通过改变群落结构和功能来影响植物群落。关于气候变暖的研究主要集中在变暖的个体影响上，但变暖与生物因素的交互影响在社区对气候变化的反应中至少可能同样重要。此外，跨越多年的气候变化实验对于捕捉年际变化并检测这些影响在生态群落中的影响是必要的。我们的研究在美国密歇根州两个早期演替植物群落进行的为期 7 年的变暖和食草操纵实验中探讨了变暖和食虫食草对植物性状和群落反应的个体和交互影响。我们发现更有力地支持变暖和食草对多种植物形态和物候特征的个体影响;只有植物发绿和结实的时间表明了变暖和食草之间的交互作用。对于食草性，变暖促进了绿色化，但随着食草性减少，变暖没有显着影响。相比之下，变暖增加了植物生物量，但变暖对生物量的影响并不取决于食草昆虫的水平。我们发现这些治疗在某些年份比其他年份效果更强，这凸显了多年实验的必要性。这项研究表明，变暖和食草可以对植物群落产生强烈的直接影响，但它们的交互作用在这些早期演替系统中是有限的。 由于这些影响的强度和方向可能因生态环境而异，因此在研究气候变化对植物及其群落的影响时，仍然建议包括生物相互作用的水平、多种性状和年份以及群落类型。