defoliation

Examples from literature

Many small trees have been entirely stripped and large ones almost defoliated. 
My trees that I go to inspect every two or three weeks, at one inspection would be leafing out, at the next would be defoliated. 
Several years ago the beet fields in the vicinity of Grand Island were threatened great injury by a certain caterpillar that had nearly defoliated all the beets growing in many of them. 
The locust miner is a beetle which is now annually defoliating trees of this species in large numbers. 

Examples of defoliate

defoliate
A large plant (size: 26 cm) was defoliated by an unidentified fungus in the early 1993 rainy season.
All surviving defoliated plants produced flowers irrespective of the level of defoliation.
The impact of defoliating insects on the growth of eucalypt saplings.
In both latter cases they produced fruit, but were abandoned and defoliated again.
Mortality of seedlings defoliated by more than 50% was around twice that of seedlings defoliated by less than 10%.
However, fewer than 10% of seedlings were defoliated by more than 50% at any time.
There was probably little or no plant reproduction during this time period because the hurricane severely defoliated many trees.
These authors observed low dispersal abilities of adults when adults dispersed from heavily defoliated areas to local areas where no defoliation had occurred before.
Treefall gaps versus forest understorey as environments for a defoliating moth on a tropical forest shrub.
Now is therefore an opportune time to obtain basic data on new methods for controlling forest defoliating pests.
The situation is similar to defoliating insects whose outbreaks are restricted to orchards and urban areas.
Moreover, outbreak species have to defoliate plants in order to be categorized as such.
Nevertheless, many individuals of these species were severely affected and most other forest trees were completely defoliated.
We often observed plants on the nests that were nearly completely defoliated by the ants, and removal of small plants seems to be part of nest maintenance.
Dense carpets of seedlings were observed in some gaps, but not generally under the intact (albeit temporarily defoliated) canopy.
These examples are from corpora and from sources on the web. Any opinions in the examples do not represent the opinion of the Cambridge Dictionary editors or of Cambridge University Press or its licensors.