Figure - PMC

Skip to main content

An official website of the United States government

Here's how you know

Here's how you know

Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.

Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

View full-text article in PMC

. 2014 May 16;90(2):347–366. doi: 10.1111/brv.12113

Search in PMC
Search in PubMed
View in NLM Catalog
Add to search

© 2014 The Authors. Biological Reviews published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Cambridge Philosophical Society

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes.

PMC Copyright notice

Fig 3 — A conceptual framework of the mechanistic pathways by which large herbivores directly and indirectly affect arthropod diversity. Arrows represent mechanisms. The first row of boxes represents biotic and abiotic conditions that are modified by large herbivores; the second row of boxes represents the mechanisms operating on arthropod individuals, populations and communities. (1) Direct effects: trampling and unintentional predation (Section III.12009); (2) direct effects: dung, carcasses, blood, live tissue (Section III.12009); (3) increase or decrease in plant species richness and changes in functional groups, the direction of which depends on large herbivore density and ecosystem properties (Section III.32006); (4) changes in vegetation structure: lowering of vegetation height through defoliation and changes in horizontal heterogeneity resulting from herbivore selectivity (Section III.22004); (5) changes in soil conditions (pH, bulk density) (Section III.42013); (6) changes in soil conditions can affect vegetation characteristics (Section III.42013); (7) changes in plant species richness can affect species richness of associated insect herbivores (Section III.32006); (8) a reduction in vegetation height can increase predation risk by vertebrate predators (Section III.22004); (9) direct competition for resources between the base of the arthropod food web and large herbivores (Section III.22004); (10) a reduction in vegetation height increases surface temperatures, but decreases shelter from climatic extremes and essential structures for egg deposition or web construction (Section III.22004); (11) changing soil properties may affect insects that spend part of their lives below ground (Section III.42013); (12–14) the combined changes in abiotic conditions, resources and predation determine the effects on each arthropod species, thereby affecting species richness; (15) due to the interactions between arthropod species, changes in species' abundances may have cascading effects on other species, with ultimate effects on total arthropod species richness.