Novel Interactions and Adaptive Rewiring in Invasive Forest Insect Communities

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Globalization ensures that invasive species will continue to arrive, establish, and cause significant disruption in our ecosystems, leading to major global change. The proposed research will increase our ability to manage such species in our forests through improved understanding of the community interactions that affect the natural enemies regulating their populations. Specifically, I explore questions related to species interactions, shifts in community diversity, and novel associations in forest insect communities, with focus on understanding interactions between native and non-native natural enemies and their associates. NSERC-DG funding will enable HQP support for primary ecological studies on insect-insect-plant interactions to elucidate mechanisms driving changes in species composition and diversity over time. Species interactions underpin invasion theory and are a major thrust of my primary research. Recent introduction of the non-native emerald ash borer (EAB), along with recruitment of natural enemies from native North American congeneric agrilid species and the implementation of classical biological control releases of Asian natural enemies, provides an ideal model system to explore novel associations and mechanisms leading to functional displacement, species rewiring, and spillover in these invaded food webs. Here, I investigate community patterns as new species establish in forest communities across a series of gradients and ask do native agrilid assemblages shift similarly after accidental (EAB) or intentional (classical bio-control) invasion, through species turnover or rewiring. Species, community, and biogeographic data will be derived across different forest gradients of tree diversity, urbanization, EAB establishment, and natural enemy introduction to quantify the degree of species interactions that can account for shifts in community assemblages. I predict that natural enemies will move from native Agrilus beetles on to EAB, and that species in these novel communities are rewired rather than replaced. Results from this primary research will add to our understanding of novel associations following invasion, and its application will be of interest to scientists, bio-control researchers, and policy-makers who regulate invasive species. My proposal requests funding to fuel the HQP that will not only provide the basic science underpinning on novel interactions and ecosystem resilience, but will also achieve unique capacity in invasion biology for Canada's most significant renewable resource, our forests.