About

Kate Mooney is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Maryland and a member of the Maryland Language Science Center. Her research expertise includes phonology, with a focus on understanding the structure and patterns of sounds in language. She is actively involved in the academic community, contributing to the advancement of linguistic knowledge through her teaching and research activities at the university.

Research topics

• Biology
• Ecology

Selected publications

• Author response for "Global insular leaf size shifts follow the island rule, independently of insect herbivory and macroclimate"

  2026-01-17

  peer-review
  PublisherDOI

• Global insular leaf size shifts follow the island rule, independently of insect herbivory and macroclimate

  Journal of Ecology · 2026-02-01

  articleOpen access

  Abstract The island rule, originally formulated for animals, predicts that small‐bodied mainland species evolve larger body sizes on islands (gigantism), but that this effect weakens with increasing mainland body size, ultimately reversing and leading to dwarfism for the largest species. This dynamic is expected to produce a positive, saturating relationship between island and mainland body size, with insular size increases at small sizes and reductions at large sizes. Despite extensive support in animals, this prediction has rarely been tested in plants. Consequently, it remains unclear whether the island rule applies to plants, whether it operates consistently across evolutionary scales, and how biotic and abiotic drivers jointly shape insular size shifts. We tested the island rule in plants by examining leaf size variation—an organ‐level analogue of body size—across 48 island species from six oceanic systems and their mainland counterparts. We conducted both conspecific comparisons (same species on islands and the mainland; n = 19 pairs) and congeneric comparisons (island endemics paired with closely related mainland species; n = 29 pairs) to assess patterns across evolutionary scales. We also measured insect herbivory and recorded climatic variables to explore ecological correlates of island–mainland variation in leaf size. Although mean leaf size did not differ significantly between island and mainland populations for either conspecific or congeneric comparisons, we detected a non‐linear, positive saturating relationship between mainland and island leaf sizes, consistent with an island rule‐like pattern. Small‐leaved mainland species tended to evolve larger leaves on islands, whereas this effect diminished for larger leaved species, a pattern observed in both conspecific and congeneric comparisons. Insect herbivory and climate did not explain these relationships. Synthesis : These findings demonstrate that plants follow the island rule for leaf size and suggest that mainland‐to‐island shifts at opposite ends of the mainland leaf size spectrum offset one another, possibly explaining no overall difference in leaf size between island and mainland populations.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Leaf‐chewing but not sap‐feeding herbivores create soil legacies that shape plant resistance through trait‐mediated, guild‐specific effects in <i>Baccharis salicifolia</i>

  Functional Ecology · 2025-12-10 · 2 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract Herbivory can affect the soil microbiome, creating legacies that affect plant resistance, but how these effects vary by feeding guild and the plant traits involved remain underexplored. We tested how soil legacies created by a leaf‐chewing caterpillar ( Spodoptera exigua ) and a sap‐feeding aphid ( Aphis gossypii ) influence resistance in Baccharis salicifolia by evaluating changes in plant traits and soil microbial diversity. We conditioned soil with three herbivory treatments on B. salicifolia : caterpillar herbivory, aphid herbivory or control (no herbivory). Then, we grew new plants in sterile soil inoculated with 10% conditioned soil from each treatment and conducted resistance bioassays, measured plant nutritional and defence traits and analysed microbial diversity. Caterpillar, but not aphid herbivory, created legacies that affected resistance to both herbivores in opposite directions: plants in caterpillar‐conditioned soil had 16% smaller aphid colonies than plants in control soil, and a 76% increase in caterpillar performance relative to aphid‐conditioned soil, suggesting guild‐specific trade‐offs in resistance. These plants also showed a 12% higher carbon‐to‐nitrogen ratio than plants in control soil, mediating resistance to the aphid but not to the caterpillar. Herbivory did not affect microbial taxonomic diversity, suggesting shifts in microbiome biomass or function underlie the observed effects. Our findings highlight that herbivory‐induced soil legacies are guild‐specific and can alter plant resistance via trait‐mediated pathways, underscoring the importance of considering herbivore identity when evaluating above–below‐ground feedbacks. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.

  PublisherDOI

• Connecting the dots: Managing species interaction networks to mitigate the impacts of global change

  eLife · 2025-04-08 · 2 citations

  reviewOpen accessSenior author

  Global change is causing unprecedented degradation of the Earth's biological systems and thus undermining human prosperity. Past practices have focused either on monitoring biodiversity decline or mitigating ecosystem services degradation. Missing, but critically needed, are management approaches that monitor and restore species interaction networks, thus bridging existing practices. Our overall aim here is to lay the foundations of a framework for developing network management, defined here as the study, monitoring, and management of species interaction networks. We review theory and empirical evidence demonstrating the importance of species interaction networks for the provisioning of ecosystem services, how human impacts on those networks lead to network rewiring that underlies ecosystem service degradation, and then turn to case studies showing how network management has effectively mitigated such effects or aided in network restoration. We also examine how emerging technologies for data acquisition and analysis are providing new opportunities for monitoring species interactions and discuss the opportunities and challenges of developing effective network management. In summary, we propose that network management provides key mechanistic knowledge on ecosystem degradation that links species- to ecosystem-level responses to global change, and that emerging technological tools offer the opportunity to accelerate its widespread adoption.

  PublisherDOI

• Mutualism and predation have contrasting effects on the diversity of pine canopy arthropod communities

  Ecology · 2025-06-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Predators are recognized to increase prey diversity by suppressing competitively dominant species, whereas mutualists are predicted to reduce diversity by promoting a competitively dominant partner. However, this trend, and the effect of these interactions when they cooccur, remains underexplored. We investigated the effects of predation and mutualism on the diversity of pine-associated arthropods by excluding insectivorous birds and mutualist ants from branches of Pinus ponderosa and sampling arthropods during a 2-year period. We identified 92,549 arthropods to the species or morphological species level. In the absence of ants, birds had no effects on diversity, whereas in the absence of birds, ants decreased Simpson diversity and Pieolu's evenness but did not affect species richness. However, in the presence of ants, birds increased diversity, evenness, and richness. Effects on arthropod composition mirrored diversity: birds alone had no effect on composition, ants alone increased aphid and aphid predator abundance, but in the presence of ants, birds reduced aphid and aphid predator abundance. In summary, we provide evidence that mutualists reduce diversity and alter community composition in pine-associated arthropods by promoting the dominance of partner species, and these interactions together are non-additive, with predator effects likely working through the disruption of the mutualism.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Different Aspects of Dominance Are Not Equivalent When Testing for Trade‐Offs in Ant Communities

  Ecology and Evolution · 2025-09-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Differences in dominance are frequently invoked to explain the outcomes of competition. Yet, what it means to be dominant, and which traits underlie dominance, are poorly understood. Here, we sought to determine the relationships between multiple aspects of dominance, the potential for trade-offs with discovery ability, and the traits associated with these patterns within a high elevation community of five ant taxa. We examined several common dominance metrics-behavioral dominance (winning aggressive encounters at both the individual and colony levels), numerical dominance (abundance and activity in baits and pitfall traps), and ecological dominance (high relative frequency in baits)-and found that individual- and colony-level behavioral dominance was positively correlated, as were ecological and numerical dominance. However, colony-level behavioral and numerical dominance were negatively correlated, and no other dominance metrics were associated. There was a dominance-discovery trade-off, as increased behavioral (but not numerical or ecological) dominance was associated with slower resource discovery. This trade-off was likely driven by behaviorally dominant ants having larger body sizes and recruiting a greater biomass of workers to baits. In contrast, fast discoverers were more abundant in the environment (i.e., numerically dominant). Complementing our empirical study, a meta-analysis of 54 responses from 21 studies showed that the association between dominance and discovery ability depended on the dominance metric. Whereas discovery ability was positively correlated with numerical dominance, its relationships with behavioral and ecological dominance were highly variable and not significantly different from zero. Overall, our empirical findings, in combination with the synthesis of past studies, demonstrate that different aspects of ant dominance are not equivalent. Yet, regardless of dominance type, there is little evidence that dominance-discovery trade-offs occur in most ant communities.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Parasitoid avoidance of intraguild predation drives enemy complementarity in a multi‐trophic ecological network

  Ecology · 2025-01-01 · 4 citations

  articleOpen access

  How consumer diversity determines consumption efficiency is a central issue in ecology. In the context of predation and biological control, this relationship concerns predator diversity and predation efficiency. Reduced predation efficiency can result from different predator taxa eating each other in addition to their common prey (interference due to intraguild predation). By contrast, multiple predator taxa with overlapping but complementary feeding niches can generate increased predation efficiency on their common prey (enemy complementarity). When viewed strictly from an ecological perspective, intraguild predation and enemy complementarity are opposing forces. However, from an evolutionary ecology perspective, predators facing strong intraguild predation may evolve traits that reduce their predation risk, possibly leading to niche complementarity between enemies; thus, selection from intraguild predation may lead to enemy complementarity rather than opposing it. As specialized predators that live in or on their hosts, parasitoids are subjected to intraguild predation from generalist predators that consume the parasitoids' hosts. The degree to which parasitoid-predator interactions are ruled by interference versus enemy complementarity has been debated. Here, we address this issue with field experiments in a forest community consisting of multiple species of trees, herbivorous caterpillars, parasitoids, ants, and birds. Our experiments and analyses found no interference effects, but revealed clear evidence for complementarity between parasitoids and birds (not ants). Parasitism rates by hymenopterans and dipterans were negatively associated with bird predation risk, and the variation in the strength of this negative association suggests that this enemy complementarity was due to parasitoid avoidance of intraguild predation. We further argue that avoidance of intraguild predation by parasitoids and other arthropod predators may explain enigmatic patterns in vertebrate-arthropod-plant food webs in a variety of terrestrial ecosystems.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Testing the contribution of vertebrate predators and leaf traits to mainland–island differences in insect herbivory on oaks

  Journal of Ecology · 2024-11-05 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access

  Abstract Ecological theory predicts that herbivory should be weaker on islands than on mainland based on the assumption that islands have lower herbivore abundance and diversity. However, empirical tests of this prediction are rare, especially for insect herbivores, and those few tests often fail to address the mechanisms behind island–mainland divergence in herbivory. In particular, past studies have not addressed the relative contribution of top‐down (i.e. predator‐driven) and bottom‐up (i.e. plant‐driven) factors to these dynamics. To address this, we experimentally excluded insectivorous vertebrate predators (e.g. birds, bats) and measured leaf traits associated with herbivory in 52 populations of 12 oak ( Quercus ) species in three island–mainland sites: The Channel Islands of California vs. mainland California, Balearic Islands vs. mainland Spain, and the island Bornholm vs. mainland Sweden ( N = 204 trees). In each site, at the end of the growing season, we measured leaf damage by insect herbivores on control vs. predator‐excluded branches and measured leaf traits, namely: phenolic compounds, specific leaf area, and nitrogen and phosphorous content. In addition, we obtained climatic and soil data for island and mainland populations using global databases. Specifically, we tested for island–mainland differences in herbivory, and whether differences in vertebrate predator effects or leaf traits between islands and mainland contributed to explaining the observed herbivory patterns. Supporting predictions, herbivory was lower on islands than on mainland, but only in the case of Mediterranean sites (California and Spain). We found no evidence for vertebrate predator effects on herbivory on either islands or mainland in any study site. In addition, while insularity affected leaf traits in some of the study sites (Sweden‐Bornholm and California), these effects were seemingly unrelated to differences in herbivory. Synthesis . Our results suggest that vertebrate predation and the studied leaf traits did not contribute to island–mainland variation patterns in herbivory, calling for more nuanced and comprehensive investigations of predator and plant trait effects, including measurements of other plant traits and assessments of predation by different groups of natural enemies.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Author response for "Tree diversity enhances predation by birds but not by arthropods across climate gradients"

  2024-03-28

  peer-review
  PublisherDOI

• Author response for "Testing the contribution of vertebrate predators and leaf traits to mainland–island differences in insect herbivory on oaks"

  2024-09-09

  peer-review
  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• DISSERTATION RESEARCH: Demographic consequences of sexually dimorphic responses to climate change

  NSF · $20k · 2014–2016

• Plant herbivore defense syndromes mediated by canopy structural complexity

  NSF · $519k · 2021–2025

• Tri-trophic consequences of herbivore diet breadth and plant resistance

  NSF · $200k · 2011–2015

• Effects of environmental clines and herbivory for plant functional traits and response to climate change

  NSF · $590k · 2014–2020

• Population consequences of sexually dimorphic responses in a plant species to ongoing and experimental changes in climate

  NSF · $287k · 2015–2021

Frequent coauthors

• Luis Abdala‐Roberts

  Autonomous University of Yucatán

  35 shared

• Xoaquín Moreira

  Misión Biológica de Galicia

  31 shared

• Annika S. Nelson

  Virginia Tech

  26 shared

• William K. Petry

  North Carolina State University

  20 shared

• Jessica D. Pratt

  University of California, Irvine

  18 shared

• Carla Vázquez‐González

  University of California, Irvine

  15 shared

• Amy M. Iler

  Northwestern University

  12 shared

• Riley Pratt

  California Department of Parks and Recreation

  11 shared

Labs

• CLIPPI

Education

• PhD, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

  University of Colorado

  2004

• BS, Environmental Science

  Wesleyan University

  1991