Format: ORAL

Andrea Cerdeira-Prez1, Lauri Laanisto2, Giacomo Puglielli1

1 Departamento de Biología Vegetal y Ecología, Facultad de Biología, Universidad de Sevilla (US), Sevilla, Spain 2 Institute of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, Estonian University of Life Sciences, Tartu, Estonia

Plants are members of a biodiverse community where interactions can either benefit or negatively impact plant fitness. Herbivore insects (negative interaction) exert a strong selective pressure on plant defensive strategies. At the same time, the production and maintenance of defenses is energetically costly and depends on habitat quality, including resource and non-resource stress levels. Accordingly, under high herbivory pressure, plants allocate resources to defense against phytophagous insects, possibly limiting resource allocation to tolerate abiotic stressors. In other words, biotic and abiotic stress tolerance can exhibit a trade-off. In that context, we aim to elucidate the role of biotic stress (defense dimension) on shaping a species abiotic tolerance syndrome. The so-called Stress Tolerance Space (STS) was recently described as a trade-off model defining the limits of ecophysiological tolerances of Northern Hemisphere woody plants towards four major abiotic stresses (shade, drought, cold and waterlogging). A plant tolerance to a given abiotic stress is constrained by other co-occurring abiotic and biotic factors and, therefore, the integration of key ecological dimensions with the STS model would allow to disentangle the multidimensional nature of woody plants adaptations to abiotic stress. To that end, we have compiled data on traits related to the feeding ecology (e.g., feeding guild, hostplant specialization) of 6000 species of phytophagous Lepidoptera and Hymenoptera associated with the woody plant species under study within the abovementioned STS model. By exploring how insect feeding traits distribute within the STS, we provide evidence of a complex association between particular sets of feeding traits and specific stress tolerance strategies in woody plants of the Northern Hemisphere, thereby gaining insights about the significance of the biotic-abiotic stress tolerance trade-off.