The role of land-use history in major invasions by woody plant species in the northeastern North American landscape

By E. Mosher, John A. Silander, Andrew M. Latimer. Biological Invasions, 2009

92 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Land-use history as a predictor of invasive alien plant distributions has received little study, especially across large spatial and temporal scales. Here we evaluate the importance of land-use history and other environmental characteristics as predictors of the distributions of a suite important invasive woody plant species in the northeastern United States. Using historical aerial photographs, we delineated 69 years (1934–2003) of land-use change across a typically heterogeneous 95 km2 landscape. We randomly surveyed over 500 sites for six invasive plant species. We found that land use history patterns strongly affected presence and abundance of the invasive plants as a group, but affected some species more than others. Generally, past agricultural use favored invasive species, whereas intact forest blocks discouraged them. Current land-use trends toward residential/commercial development favor disturbance-adapted species like Celastrus orbiculatus (asiatic bittersweet) and will probably slow the spread of post-agricultural specialists such as Berberis thunbergii (Japanese barberry).

Subfields: Ecology, Nature and Landscape Conservation, Plant Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8cc06c3f9883ba31d029ce7362f68375b29b6d7f

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Citations in the corpus

Identifying hotspots for plant invasions and forecasting focal points of further spread (2009, background): “Land use change has influenced the growth and spread of invasive plants in the past (DeGasperis & Motzkin 2007; Mosher et al. 2009) and while we assumed here that landscape relationships will remain stable, we should also keep in mind that future landscape dynamics may alter the prevalence of…”
Plant invasions in the landscape (2011, background): “Many alien species took advantage of ‘‘windows of opportunity’’ after landscape scale disturbances facilitated their spread (DeGasperis and Motzkin 2007; Mosher et al. 2009).”
Hotspots of plant invasion predicted by propagule pressure and ecosystem characteristics (2011, background): “…2004) and lack of response to radiation], the strongest trends complied with theory- and evidence-based expectations [e.g. relationships with habitat fragmentation (Cadenasso & Pickett, 2001), road proximity (von der Lippe & Kowarik, 2007) and land use (Mosher et al., 2009; Parker et al., 2010)].”