The project work involved establishing and coordinating field monitoring across ~70 field sites on all continents except Antarctica, across most major natural environmental gradients and several globally renowned existing experiments. The technology involved in the work has been relatively simple and well established, this has been critical to the logistical and technical achievement of the network by ensuring that the methods could be applied consistently and repeatably in many different situations across all of the field sites. At each site, data on leaf level herbivory, site climate, soil properties, plant productivity and chemistry were collected. These data were collated and analyzed to estimate rates of, and controls over, herbivore mediated nutrients fluxes in broadleaf forests at a global scale.
Broadly the data show that (1) Release of relatively small quantities of nutrients from herbivory by insects at low densities could affect long-term ecosystem biogeochemistry as much or more than episodic outbreak events; (2) Secondly, climate change in broadleaf forests can have important but variable impacts on both forest productivity and and insect herbivory rates, with major consequences for ecosystem processes, but the magnitude and direction of these impacts will depend on the climate variable, foliar element and spatio-temporal scale under consideration and; (3) Ecosystem models should include a more detailed representation of herbivory to accurately project current and likely future patterns of biogeochemical cycling.
These results have been disseminated widely via a wide range of outlets including multiple articles in international peer reviewed scientific journals, presentations at scientific conferences, and various publications and interviews in national and international media targeting the general public
