Local vs regional factors as determinants of the invasibility of indigenous forest fragments by alien plant species

By R. Ohlemüller, S. Walker, J. Wilson. 2006

112 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Both local and regional filters can determine the invasion of alien species into native plant communities. However, their relative importance is essentially unknown. We used plot data from fragments of indigenous forests in southeastern New Zealand to infer which factors are important in explaining invasibility, measured as alien species richness. Twenty-eight predictor variables comprising both local factors (stand structure and soil) and regional ones (climate and land cover) were assessed. Reduction or increase in deviance in linear models was assessed, both individually and with a forward and backward stepwise variable selection procedure using the Akaike information criterion (AIC). We found that higher alien species richness was mainly associated with forest fragments of small area in warm and dry climates and where there were only small areas of surrounding indigenous forest. Local soil and stand structure variables had considerably smaller effects on alien species richness than the regional land cover and climate variables. Alien species richness showed no relationship with native species richness. We conclude that in the forest fragments investigated here, of the variables included in the analyses, regional land cover and climate variables are potentially important drivers for alien species richness at plot level. This has implications for projections of alien species spread in the future under different climate change and land use scenarios.

Subfields: Ecological Modeling, Ecology, Nature and Landscape Conservation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c308ad6f948793a6dd6de7fd7838098ec8ef7e89

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Citations in the corpus

Tree invasions: a comparative test of the dominant hypotheses and functional traits (2011, background): “With local and regional factors as determinants of forest invasibility (Knight and Reich 2005; Ohlemüller et al. 2006), the empty niche hypothesis seems too vague and less precisely defined than the ideas supported by the other hypotheses.”
Plant invasion across space and time: factors affecting nonindigenous species success during four stages of invasion. (2007, background): “While large patches often favor natives, smaller patches may promote NIPS (Timmens & Williams, 1991; Harrison et al., 2001; Ohlemuller et al., 2006).”
Plant invasions in the landscape (2011, background): “1; Bartuszevige et al. 2006; Ohlemüller et al. 2006).”
Alien plant invasion and their impact on indigenous species diversity at global scale: A review (2010, background): “So, plant invasions are clearly a potent force of change, operating on a global scale and affecting many dimensions of society (Wilcove et al., 1998; Ohlemuller et al., 2006).”
Plant invasions are context‐dependent: multiscale effects of climate, human activity and habitat (2014, background): “higher grassland and woodland cover) might act as a buffer to plant invasions (Ohlemüller et al., 2006; Carboni et al., 2010).”
Exploring species attributes and site characteristics to assess plant invasions in Spain (2009, background): “…of introduced species (Py s ek & Richardson, 2007) or the characteristics that make some regions more vulnerable to invasion than others (Ohlemüller et al ., 2006), surprisingly there have been few studies that included both species and site perspectives (Thuiller et al ., 2006) or even…”