Summary
Both relative abundance and absolute abundance of alien weed species in a large geographic region increased from the year 1900 to 1980. The increase in relative abundance may have been due to competitive displacement among the weeds, patterns of landscape disturbance, or simply time. The increase in absolute abundance indicates the ineffectiveness of past weed control policies in stemming weed migration. Combined, the two scales of alien weed abundance suggest that in the future we can expect an increasing diversity of increasingly common weeds.
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This work was supported in part through a grant from the A.P.H.I.S. Program of the U.S.A. Dept of Agriculture to the Montana Dept of Agriculture
For the purposes of this report we define an alien weed as any plant species that (1) exists without purposeful cultivation in regions wherein it did not occur prior to settlement of foreign peoples, and (2) tends to have a negative economic impact, no matter how obscure, in the region of concern
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Forcella, F., Harvey, S.J. Relative abundance in an alien weed flora. Oecologia 59, 292–295 (1983). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00378851
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00378851