Abstract
A fundamental question in invasive plant ecology is whether invasive and native plants have different ecological roles. Differences in functional traits have been explored, but we lack a comparison of the factors affecting the spread of co-occurring natives and invasives. Some have proposed that to succeed, invasives would colonize a wider variety of sites, would disperse farther, or would be better at colonizing sites with more available light and soil nutrients than natives. We examined patterns of spread over 70 years in a regenerating forest in Connecticut, USA, where both native and invasive species acted as colonizers. We compared seven invasive and 19 native species in the characteristics of colonized plots, variation in these characteristics, and the importance of site variables for colonization. We found little support for the hypotheses that invasive plants succeed by dispersing farther than native plants or by having a broader range of site tolerances. Colonization by invasives was also not more dependent on light than colonization by natives. Like native understory species, invasive plants spread into closed-canopy forest and species-rich communities despite earlier predictions that these communities would resist invasion. The biggest differences were that soil nitrate and the initial land cover being open field increased the odds of colonization for most invasives but only for some natives. In large part, though, the spread of native and invasive plants was affected by similar factors.
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The datasets used and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
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Acknowledgements
Thank you to Priya Kohli for advice with the statistical analysis, William A. Niering and Richard H. Goodwin for setting up the permanent plots, and many students and faculty who collected the long-term data. We also thank two reviewers whose suggestions improved this paper.
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Connecticut College, Goodwin Environmental Research Fellowship, Matthew Yamamoto.
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Both authors conceived and designed the study. MHY analyzed the data with significant input from CCJ, and both authors wrote the manuscript.
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Communicated by Yu-Long Feng.
This long-term study is the first direct comparison of the spread of co-occurring native and invasive plants in forests. While the spread of natives and invasives have historically been studied separately, our results demonstrate that knowledge on native plant succession and community assembly can aid in the critical goal of understanding how invasive plants invade.
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Yamamoto, M.H., Jones, C.C. Comparing long-term patterns of spread of native and invasive plants in a successional forest. Oecologia 205, 13–25 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-024-05554-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-024-05554-7