Dissection of the Species-Area Relationship Among Wood-Boring Insects and Their Host Plants

The species-area relationship between wood-boring insects and the geographic range of their host plants is derived from the tendency for wide-ranging plants to be a part of more wood-boring insect communities than plants with smaller geographic ranges. In contrast to the expectation of the area-per se hypothesis, plants in a given forest that have large geographic ranges do not show richer wood-boring insect faunas than co-occurring plants with small ranges. The passive-sampling hypothesis can also be excluded because sampling differences do not account for the pattern. Only the habitat-heterogeneity explanation for the species-area relationship is consistent with the data and analyses presented.