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Naturalized and invasive alien flora of Ghana

  • Alien Floras and Faunas 3
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Abstract

The paper provides an inventory of the naturalized vascular flora of Ghana, based on newly gathered information from the literature and consultations with local experts. We adopted a rather conservative approach by including only species for which strong evidence exists that they are alien in Ghana. We recorded 291 species of naturalized alien plants; for 237 of them there is information on their distribution in the 10 administrative regions of Ghana. Twenty-five species (i.e. 8.6% of the total number of naturalized species) are classified as invasive. There are 21 widely distributed species (7.2% of the total naturalized flora) that occur in at least eight regions, and five of them are distributed all over the country: Azadirachta indica, Echinochloa colona, Leucaena leucocephala, Senna occidentalis and S. siamea. Of these five, the first three are classified as invasive. The naturalized flora of Ghana includes 71 families, with Leguminosae (66 species), Compositae (22) and Poaceae (18) most represented. The majority of species have their native range in South and North America, contributing 161 and 127 species, respectively. Tropical Asia (98 species) and Africa (37 species) are less represented and only three species have their origin in Europe. The dominance of the Americas as a source region is even more pronounced for the subset of invasive species, with this continent accounting for 18 species out of 25 (72%). Annual and biennial/perennial herbs, shrubs and trees are evenly represented in the naturalized alien species pool. Among invasive species, biennial/perennial herbs are markedly over-represented compared to their contribution to the naturalized flora as a whole (52% vs 38%). The same is true for aquatic species (12% vs 2%). Species that occur as naturalized in more than 40 regions in Africa are also more widely distributed within Ghana. The numbers of naturalized species in the administrative regions of Ghana varied from 34 in Upper West to 173 in Greater Accra. These numbers increased with human population density and decreased with distance from the sea, but this pattern was driven by the city of Accra region. The only predictor that remained significant after removing this outlier was the amount of precipitation in the dry period, which was positively associated with the regional richness of naturalized species. This study could serve as a stimulus for other countries in hitherto understudied tropical regions to work towards comprehensive inventories, for which basic data on the alien flora often is still incomplete.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank colleagues at Forest Research Institute of Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Friends of the Earth, Resource Trust, and Forest Services Department of Ghana whose feedback helped improved the manuscript. MA was supported by KNUST Research Fund, PP and JP were supported by project no. 14-36079G Centre of Excellence PLADIAS (Czech Science Foundation) and long-term research development project RVO 67985939 (The Czech Academy of Sciences). FE was supported by the Austrian Science Foundation FWF (Grant I2086-B16), and MvK by the German Research Foundation DFG (Grant 264740629). We thank Zuzana Sixtová for technical assistance. We appreciate the comments of three anonymous reviewers on the previous version of the manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Silviculture and Forest Management, Faculty of Renewable Natural Resources, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Kumasi, Ghana

    Michael Ansong

  2. Department of Invasion Ecology, Institute of Botany, Czech Academy of Sciences, 252 43, Průhonice, Czech Republic

    Jan Pergl, Martin Hejda & Petr Pyšek

  3. Division of Conservation Biology, Vegetation Ecology and Landscape Ecology, University of Vienna, Rennweg 14, 1030, Vienna, Austria

    Franz Essl

  4. Ecology, Department of Biology, University of Konstanz, Universitätsstrasse 10, 78467, Konstanz, Germany

    Mark van Kleunen

  5. Zhejiang Provincial Key Laboratory of Plant Evolutionary Ecology and Conservation, Taizhou University, Taizhou, 318000, China

    Mark van Kleunen

  6. Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development: Invasive Species, Agriculture and Food, 3 Baron-Hay Court, South Perth, WA, 6151, Australia

    Rod Randall

  7. Department of Ecology, Faculty of Science, Charles University, Viničná 7, 128 44, Prague, Czech Republic

    Petr Pyšek

  8. Department of Botany and Zoology, Centre for Invasion Biology, Stellenbosch University, Matieland, 7602, South Africa

    Petr Pyšek

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Correspondence to Michael Ansong.

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10530_2018_1860_MOESM1_ESM.docx

Supplementary Material 1. List of data sources used to compile the inventory of naturalized alien species in Ghana (DOCX 21 kb)

Supplementary Material 2. List of naturalized alien species in Ghana recorded in the present study (XLSX 32 kb)

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Ansong, M., Pergl, J., Essl, F. et al. Naturalized and invasive alien flora of Ghana. Biol Invasions 21, 669–683 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10530-018-1860-7

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