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Allelopathy of a native grassland community as a potential mechanism of resistance against invasion by introduced plants

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Abstract

Successful plant invasions depend, at least partly, on interactions between introduced plants and native plant communities. While allelopathic effects of introduced invaders on native resident species have received much attention, the reverse, i.e. allelopathic effects of native residents on introduced plants, have been largely neglected. Therefore, we tested whether allelopathy of native plant communities decreases their invasibility to introduced plant species. In addition, we tested among the introduced species whether the invasive ones are more tolerant to allelopathy of native plant communities than the non-invasive ones. To test these hypotheses, we grew nine pairs of related (congeneric or confamilial) invasive and non-invasive introduced plant species (i.e. 18 species) in the presence or absence of a native grassland community, which consisted of three common forbs and three common grasses, with or without activated carbon in the soil. Activated carbon reduced the survival percentage and growth of introduced plants in the absence of the native plant community. However, its net effect on the introduced plants was neutral or even slightly positive in the presence of the native community. This might suggest that the native plant community imposed allelopathic effects on the introduced plants, and that these effects were neutralized or reduced by activated carbon. The invasive and non-invasive introduced plants, however, did not differ in their tolerance to such allelopathic effects of the native plant community. Thus, although allelopathy of native plant communities might increase their resistance against introduced plants, there was no evidence that tolerance to allelopathy of native plant communities contributes to the degree of invasiveness of introduced plants.

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Acknowledgments

We thank Otmar Ficht, Claudia Martin and Timo Scheu for assistance with the experiment, Wayne Dawson, Yanjie Liu, Mialy Razanajatovo, Ayub Oduor and Noëlie Maureland for helpful comments on earlier manuscript drafts, and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (2015ZCQ-BH-01), NSFC (31570413) and the China Scholarship Council for financial support.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Nature Conservation, Beijing Forestry University, Qinghua East Road 35, Beijing, 100083, China

    Lei Ning & Fei-Hai Yu

  2. Ecology, Biology Department, University of Konstanz, Universitätsstrasse 10, 78464, Constance, Germany

    Lei Ning & Mark van Kleunen

Authors
  1. Lei Ning
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  2. Fei-Hai Yu
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  3. Mark van Kleunen
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Fei-Hai Yu.

Appendices

Appendix 1

See Table 3.

Table 3 List of the 18 introduced species for which we tested whether they are affected by competitive and allelopathic effects of a native plant community in Germany
Full size table

Appendix 2

See Table 4.

Table 4 Results of a generalized linear mixed model for the ratio of shoot to total biomass of the nine invasive and nine non-invasive introduced species grown in the absence of the native plant community with or without the addition of activated carbon to the soil
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Appendix 3

See Fig. 3.

Fig. 3
figure 3

Aboveground biomass (mean ± standard error) of each of the nine invasive and the nine non-invasive introduced species in the presence or absence of the native community with or without activated carbon. See “Appendix 1” section for full species names, and the scales of y axes differ among species

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Appendix 4

See Fig. 4.

Fig. 4
figure 4

Ratio of aboveground to total biomass (mean ± standard error) of the native plant community in the absence of introduced plants with or without activated carbon

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Ning, L., Yu, FH. & van Kleunen, M. Allelopathy of a native grassland community as a potential mechanism of resistance against invasion by introduced plants. Biol Invasions 18, 3481–3493 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10530-016-1239-6

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