Fig. 1: Defoliator outbreaks reduce forest cover.
From: Forest defoliator outbreaks alter nutrient cycling in northern waters
We calculated the monthly leaf area index (LAI) across 12 catchments in Ontario, Canada from 1985 to 2016. For visualization purposes, monthly catchment-level averages of LAI were grouped into three equal-width bins for the proportion of the catchment area defoliated and points show the corresponding mean ± SE. However, slopes were estimated to models fitted to non-binned data with N = 384 per month (Supplementary Table 2). The mean value of each bin is displayed with the corresponding range in parentheses. The shaded area is the typical senescence period for the southern boreal forest. Upper arrows illustrate general life stages of phytophagous insects while lower arrows show leaf phenology. Asterisks (*) denote a statistically significant effect of the percentage of catchment damaged on LAI within a given month calculated using estimated marginal means (see Supplementary Table 2). Conditional \({R}_{c}^{2}\) = 0.81.
