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Is there an urban effect in alien plant invasions?

  • URBAN INVASIONS
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Abstract

Cities are known to be extraordinarily rich in alien plant species compared to rural environments. This is related to specific attributes of urban areas including the availability of natural resources and habitats (namely geological substrates and land cover), the dispersal pathways and associated propagule pressure due to trade and traffic, and the proximity many urban hubs have to rivers. Here we explored how richness and proportions of alien species introduced after the discovery of the Americas (so-called neophytes), can be explained by environmental covariates along the urbanization gradient from very rural to very urbanized grid cells. We tested whether there is a specific urban effect, either as an interaction effect of urbanized areas that changes these general relationships, or if there is an effect due to specific urban conditions. We found that the environmental covariates explaining richness as well as proportions of neophytes remain largely the same across the rural–urban gradient. There is, however, an effect of urbanized area on neophyte species richness and proportions, which also incorporates strictly urban conditions. Rivers, roads and railroads contribute disproportionately less to the increase of neophyte species diversity in more urbanized areas, which might be due to the already higher number of neophytes in cities. We argue that the conditions determining neophyte richness in cities are not fundamentally different from those in rural environments, but extend on the same environmental axis, i.e. having different positions along the gradient towards the upper end.

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge the work of thousands of volunteers mapping the flora of Germany which is incorporated in www.floraweb.de, provided and maintained by the Federal Agency for Nature Conservation on behalf of the German Network for Phytodiversity (NetPhyD). We thank Sarah Passonneau for improving the language. Petr Pyšek and two anonymous referees provided valuable comments on the manuscript. This work was funded by the Programme Oriented Funding of the Helmholtz Association to the research programme “Terrestrial Environment”, Topic “Land Use, Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services/Renewable Energies”, Integrated Project T11 (Emerging Ecosystems). An early version of this paper was presented at a workshop on ‘Non-native species in urban environments’ hosted and funded by the DST-NRF Centre of Excellence for Invasion Biology (C·I·B) in Stellenbosch, South Africa, in November 2016. Comments and suggestions from participants at the workshop improved the paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Community Ecology, Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research – UFZ, Theodor-Lieser-Str. 4, 06120, Halle, Germany

    Ingolf Kühn, Janis Wolf & Aline Schneider

  2. Geobotany and Botanical Garden, Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, Am Kirchtor 1, 06108, Halle, Germany

    Ingolf Kühn & Aline Schneider

  3. German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) Halle-Jena-Leipzig, Deutscher Platz 5e, 04103, Leipzig, Germany

    Ingolf Kühn

  4. Geography Department, Humbold University Berlin, Rudower Chaussee 16, 12489, Berlin, Germany

    Janis Wolf

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  1. Ingolf Kühn
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Correspondence to Ingolf Kühn.

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Guest Editors: Mirijam Gaertner, John R.U. Wilson, Marc W. Cadotte, J. Scott MacIvor, Rafael D. Zenni and David M. Richardson/Urban Invasions.

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Kühn, I., Wolf, J. & Schneider, A. Is there an urban effect in alien plant invasions?. Biol Invasions 19, 3505–3513 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10530-017-1591-1

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