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Impact of invasive plants in Mediterranean habitats: disentangling the effects of characteristics of invaders and recipient communities

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Abstract

While the effects of an invasive alien plant that has become dominant in a community may seem obvious, there are few studies that attempt to understand how impacts vary according to the characteristics of invaders and recipient communities. For this purpose, the vegetation of invaded and non-invaded plots was sampled for eight different invasive species in a variety of habitats within the French continental Mediterranean region. Most of the observed impact variation was species-specific, with greater effects on community-level metrics found for Carpobrotus spp. and Reynoutria × bohemica and lower effects for Amorpha fruticosa, Ambrosia artemisiifolia and Phyla filiformis. Some trends were consistent with competition-driven processes, with higher impact found in the presence of rhizomatous and creeping perennial invasive species compared to annuals, or in habitats with sparse vegetation. The importance of community characteristics such as the cover of the invasive plant or the differences in cover between the invader and the native dominant species confirmed previous results obtained in Central Europe. Therefore, such variables, easy to measure and with a generic value, could be profitably integrated into risk assessment methods to improve the prediction of the most threatened habitats. Beyond the overall decline in species diversity, the presence of some invasive species was associated with significant changes in species composition, with a filtering toward more shade-tolerant and nitrophilous ruderal species. Managers should consider replacement of resident species by species with different ecological preferences together with simple community-level metrics, to decide whether management is justified.

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Acknowledgments

We gratefully acknowledge financial support by the French Agency for Food, Environmental and occupational Health & Safety (ANSES) for allowing MSc grants to NC (2011) and CP (2012). We thank Isabelle Mandon-Dalger (FCBN) for fruitful discussion, Claire Tetrel (Domaine de la Palissade), Luc Capon (Communauté de communes de la Cévenne des Hauts Gardons), Benjamin Sirot (CEN-LR) and Jean-Philippe Reygrobellet (SMAGE des Gardons) for their kind permission of access to some study sites, as well as to Jean-Marie Ramel, Jean-Claude Streito and Philippe Reynaud (Anses) for their assistance in the field. The authors are also grateful to two anonymous reviewers for valuable comments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Laboratoire de la Santé des Végétaux, Unité entomologie et plantes invasives, Anses, CBGP, Campus International de Baillarguet, CS 30016, 34988, Montferrier-sur-Lez Cedex, France

    G. Fried, C. Pierre & N. Chagué

  2. Université de Bourgogne, UMR 1347 Agroécologie AgroSup/INRA/uB, 6 boulevard Gabriel, 21000, Dijon, France

    B. Laitung, C. Pierre & N. Chagué

  3. Melbourne School of Land and Environment, The University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC, 3010, Australia

    F. D. Panetta

Authors
  1. G. Fried
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  2. B. Laitung
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  3. C. Pierre
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  4. N. Chagué
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  5. F. D. Panetta
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to G. Fried.

Appendices

Appendix 1

See Table 5.

Table 5 Overview of locations used in the study (with five replications per locations)
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Appendix 2

See Table 6.

Table 6 Summary of the linear mixed models analyses describing the effects of species, habitats (nested within species) and locality (nested within habitats nested within species) on the relative impacts on species richness (S), on Shannon’s diversity (H′) and on the Jaccard dissimilarity index (DJ)
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Appendix 3

See Table 7.

Table 7 Summary of significant variations in frequency of occurrence for 61 species amongst invaded and non-invaded plots
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Fried, G., Laitung, B., Pierre, C. et al. Impact of invasive plants in Mediterranean habitats: disentangling the effects of characteristics of invaders and recipient communities. Biol Invasions 16, 1639–1658 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10530-013-0597-6

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