The application of in‐field and aerial spectroscopy to assess functional and phylogenetic variation in plants has led to novel ecological insights and supports global assessments of plant biodiversity. Understanding how plant genetic variation influences reflectance spectra will help harness this potential for biodiversity monitoring and improve understanding of why plants differ in functional responses to environmental change...

Early‐season herbivory can cause plants to induce resistance to subsequent herbivores, and this ubiquitous plant defense strategy has been shown to be adaptive when subsequent vegetative‐feeding herbivores impact plant fitness. However, a growing number of studies show that leaf herbivory can also induce defenses in plant reproductive tissues, which may deter mutualists such as pollinators and seed dispersers, or antagonists s...

Plants employ hormone‐mediated signaling pathways to defend against pathogens and insects. We tested predictions about the relative effect of jasmonate and salicylate pathways and how they mediate interactions between pathogens and herbivores. We employed two pathogens of tomato, Pseudomonas syringae ( Pst ) and tobacco mosaic virus (TMV), that are known to elicit distinct components of the two pathways, and we address the con...

Roots play a critical, but largely unappreciated, role in aboveground anti‐herbivore plant defense (e.g. resistance and tolerance) and root–leaf connections may therefore result in unexpected coupling between above‐ and belowground consumers. Using the tobacco ( Nicotiana tabacum ) system we highlight two examples of this phenomenon. First, the secondary metabolite nicotine is produced in roots, yet translocated aboveground fo...

The attraction of natural enemies of herbivores by volatile organic compounds as an induced indirect defence has been studied in several plant systems. The evidence for their defensive function originates mainly from laboratory studies with trained parasitoids and predators; the defensive function of these emissions for plants in natural settings has been rarely demonstrated. In native populations and laboratory Y‐tube choice...

Lepidopteran larvae oral secretions and regurgitant (R), which contain a plethora of potential elicitors, are known to dramatically change a plant's wound response. We demonstrate, with a detailed microarray and secondary metabolite analysis, that the two most abundant fatty acid‐amino acid conjugates (FACs) in the R of the specialist herbivore Manduca sexta (Lepidoptera, Sphingidae) can account for all measured direct (trypsi...