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Combining the effects of surrounding land-use and propagule pressure to predict the distribution of an invasive plant

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Abstract

The distribution of invasive plants across a landscape is largely governed by disturbance invoking anthropogenic land-use practices and propagule pressure. However, spatial variability associated with anthropogenic disturbances and propagule pressure is seldom used to develop distribution models of invasive plants. This study makes use of large-scale survey data to develop a spatially explicit predictive model for the invasive wetland plant—purple loosestrife. Using loosestrife presence data and land use land cover information, we first predicted loosestrife occurrences in two types of wetland habitat, namely herbaceous wetlands and open-water edges, with a series of logistic regression models that incorporated surrounding land-use at three different neighborhood scales. The best-fitting surrounding land-use model was then combined with three different distance constraint models that simulated propagule pressure. Loosestrife occurrence as a function of surrounding land-use showed best fit at a neighborhood radius of 400 m. Predictions made from the surrounding land-use model at the 400 m scale were fairly accurate and loosestrife invasion of wetland locations were correlated with the proportion of anthropogenic land-use conditions. Inclusion of an autocovariate simulating propagule pressure improved model fit and performance significantly. Model findings suggest that spatially explicit incorporation of surrounding land-use yields an ecologically realistic projection of invasion risk wherein disturbance prone habitat edges tend to be more invasible. Combining this prediction with location specific estimates of propagule pressure further reduces uncertainty by spatially constraining areas of high invasion risk. Our approach is applicable to other invasive plants since it is based on two key drivers of plant invasion: disturbance and propagule-pressure.

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Acknowledgments

We are thankful to Minnesota-DNR’s Invasive Species Program for the loosestrife data and for financially supporting the first author in the form of a summer stipend. The first author is grateful to Luke Skinner and Adam Doll of Minnesota-DNR for providing valuable on-field information regarding loosestrife invasion and spread. We are also thankful to members of plant lab group at Iowa State University and two anonymous reviewers for suggesting ways to improve the model presentation and write-up. The first author is also grateful to the EEB program at Iowa State, which provided research support through several semesters of support as a Research Assistant.

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Author notes

  1. Shyam M. Thomas

    Present address: Department of Entomology, University of California, Riverside, CA, 92507, USA

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Organismal Biology, Iowa State University, Ames, IA, 50011, USA

    Shyam M. Thomas & Kirk A. Moloney

Authors
  1. Shyam M. Thomas
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  2. Kirk A. Moloney
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Shyam M. Thomas.

Appendices

Appendix 1

See Fig. 6.

Fig. 6
figure 6

Comparison of the fitted decline in propagule pressure estimates between nearest neighbor model (NN) and nearest negative exponential decay model (NED) as a function of increasing distance for herbaceous wetlands. For the NED model, the decline in propagule pressure was estimated by finding the best-fitting rate of decay parameter (i.e. b = 0.0019). See ‘Methods’ for details on model structure and parameter estimation (Note: for open water edges the difference in propagule pressure patterns is overall similar)

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Appendix 2

See Table 3.

Table 3 PC loadings at 400 m radius for herbaceous wetlands and open water edges
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Appendix 3

See Fig. 7.

Fig. 7
figure 7

Map of the four conterminous counties selected as the study area showing loosestrife invasion risk for both herbaceous wetlands and open water edges as predicted by the autologistic regression model with propagule pressure estimated using the cumulative distance (CD) model. The empty white space represents the matrix around the wetland habitats, which comprise of the remaining 12 land use land cover categories

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Thomas, S.M., Moloney, K.A. Combining the effects of surrounding land-use and propagule pressure to predict the distribution of an invasive plant. Biol Invasions 17, 477–495 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10530-014-0745-7

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