Team members: Anshuman Swain1, S Augusta Maccraken2,3, William F Fagan1, and Conrad C Labandeira2,3
1Department of Biology, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, USA; 2Department of Entomology, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, USA; 3Department of Paleobiology, Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, Washington DC, USA
Plant–insect associations have been an important and dominant part of terrestrial ecology for over 400 million years. Evaluating these interactions in the fossil record, through new methods, can help us in understanding evolutionary and ecological forces that might have shaped the structure of these interactions. In this work, we use a bipartite network representation of fossilized plants and different types of herbivory damages on their leaves, to understand plant-insect interactions and facilitate a more quantitative system-level description of the system. For this work, we focus on four late Paleozoic assemblages from north-central Texas, but the methods used in this work are general and can be applied to any well-preserved fossil flora.
Keywords: bipartite networks, fossil flora, plant-insect interactions, herbivory
The data used in this project has been collected from four Texas paleozoic floras - Williamson Drive (WD), Mitchell Creek Flats (MCF), Colwell Creek Pond (CCP) and South Ash Pasture (SAP), and has been collected by members and associates of the Labandeira Lab at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, Washington DC. The code is divided into three basic files: data processing, network plotting and properties and statistical analyses. Using these files, one can replicate the results ans figures obtained in the work.
If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact any of the authors.