A global assessment of invasive plant impacts on resident species, communities and ecosystems: the interaction of impact measures, invading species' traits and environment

By Petr Pyšek, V. Jarošı́k, P. Hulme, Jan Pergl, M. Hejda, Urs Schaffner, M. Vilà. Global Change Biology, 2012

1,402 citations recorded by the source corpus.

With the growing body of literature assessing the impact of invasive alien plants on resident species and ecosystems, a comprehensive assessment of the relationship between invasive species traits and environmental settings of invasion on the characteristics of impacts is needed. Based on 287 publications with 1551 individual cases that addressed the impact of 167 invasive plant species belonging to 49 families, we present the first global overview of frequencies of significant and non‐significant ecological impacts and their directions on 15 outcomes related to the responses of resident populations, species, communities and ecosystems. Species and community outcomes tend to decline following invasions, especially those for plants, but the abundance and richness of the soil biota, as well as concentrations of soil nutrients and water, more often increase than decrease following invasion. Data mining tools revealed that invasive plants exert consistent significant impacts on some outcomes (survival of resident biota, activity of resident animals, resident community productivity, mineral and nutrient content in plant tissues, and fire frequency and intensity), whereas for outcomes at the community level, such as species richness, diversity and soil resources, the significance of impacts is determined by interactions between species traits and the biome invaded. The latter outcomes are most likely to be impacted by annual grasses, and by wind pollinated trees invading mediterranean or tropical biomes. One of the clearest signals in this analysis is that invasive plants are far more likely to cause significant impacts on resident plant and animal richness on islands rather than mainland. This study shows that there is no universal measure of impact and the pattern observed depends on the ecological measure examined. Although impact is strongly context dependent, some species traits, especially life form, stature and pollination syndrome, may provide a means to predict impact, regardless of the particular habitat and geographical region invaded.

Subfields: Ecology, Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Nature and Landscape Conservation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f5a46b3919c0dd146fae61b3d8b4dd9520e8b663

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Citations in the corpus

Biogeomorphic Impacts of Invasive Species (2014, background): “Comprehensive reviews have been conducted on the impact of invasive species on ecosystem processes (e.g., Ehrenfeld 2010, Pyšek et al. 2012, Simberloff et al. 2012, Ricciardi et al. 2013), but syntheses of effects on physical processes and structures are limited (Simberloff 2011).”
How Safe Is Weed Biological Control? A Global Review of Direct Nontarget Attack (2019, background): “…vital parameters of native species (Pyšek et al. 2012), species richness and diversity (Gerber et al. 2008; Hejda et al. 2009), agriculture and forest production, nutrient and fire cycles, water availability, and recreation and tourism (Charles and Dukes 2007; Beck et al. 2008b; Pyšek et al. 2012).”
Biological control of weeds: an analysis of introductions, rates of establishment and estimates of success, worldwide (2018, background): “…forestry and infrastructure (Beck et al. 2008; Pimentel et al. 2005; Pyšek et al. 2012) or threaten native biodiversity and ecosystem services (Pejchar and Mooney 2009; Pyšek et al. 2012; Vila et al. 2011), all of which can ultimately impair human livelihoods (Shackleton et al. 2007).”
An inventory of invasive alien species in China (2012, background): “Furthermore, it addresses both negative and positive effects of IAS, since positive effects are often neglected in purely ecological impact studies (Goodenough 2010, Davis et al. 2011, but see Pyšek et al. 2012 for a global review).”
Are urban systems beneficial, detrimental, or indifferent for biological invasion? (2017, background): “Despite recent debates about the effects of invasive NIS on ecosystems and the importance of managing them (Davis et al. 2011b; Simberloff 2011), it is clear that NIS have both negative and positive impacts depending on the local context and the specific measure of impact (Pyšek et al. 2012).”
Greater Focus Needed on Alien Plant Impacts in Protected Areas (2014, methodology): “Here, we use an existing dataset of alien plant impacts in their invaded range (Vilà et al. 2011; Pyšek et al. 2012) to evaluate whether sufficient focus has been allocated to studies of impacts in protected areas.”
Impacts of invasive biota in forest ecosystems in an aboveground–belowground context (2017, background): “Other comparative and synthetic studies have also shown comparatively weak overall differences between invasive and native plant species, although overall positive effects on soil microbial activity and nitrogen availability (Liao et al. 2008; Godoy et al. 2010; Vilà et al. 2011; Pyšek et al. 2012).”
Invaders among locals: Alien species decrease phylogenetic and functional diversity while increasing dissimilarity among native community members (2018, background): “We considered a plot invaded when it contained at least one neophyte species—of the 1,839 species, 138 were neophytes (Pyšek et al., 2012).”
Catalogue of alien plants of the Czech Republic (3rd edition) (2022, background): “…which reflects the fact that studies summarizing information on impacts across alien floras of large regions are still rare despite intensive research in the last few years (Parker 1999, Gaertner et al. 2009, Pyšek & Richardson 2010, Vilà et al. 2010, 2011, Winter et al. 2009, Pyšek et al. 2012).”
Facilitation and the invasibility of plant communities (2021, background): “Expansions of non- native species negatively affect native species, communities and ecosystem functioning (Blackburn et al., 2019; Pyšek et al., 2012; Simberloff et al., 2013; Vilà et al., 2011).”
A Unified Classification of Alien Species Based on the Magnitude of their Environmental Impacts (2014, background): “broad range of environmental impacts, defined here as measurable changes to the properties of an ecosystem by an alien species [1,2], at different levels of organisation (Box 1).”
Progress toward understanding the ecological impacts of nonnative species (2013, background): “Species traits have been demonstrably linked to invasiveness (Kolar and Lodge 2002, van Kleunen et al. 2010), but less so to impact (Byers et al. 2002, NRC 2002, Ricciardi 2003, Pyšek et al. 2012, Lockwood et al. 2013).”
Invasive weed species’ threats to global biodiversity: Future scenarios of changes in the number of invasive species in a changing climate (2020, background): “Invasive plants can, along with changes in mineral and nutrient content in plant tissues, directly exert an influence on the survival, productivity, and activity of native biota, and contribute to species richness, diversity, and soil resources at the community level, through the interaction between”
Invasive plants as drivers of regime shifts: identifying high‐priority invaders that alter feedback relationships (2014, background): “The impacts of invasives are strongly context-dependent and can have substantially different outcomes depending on the type of invader and the invaded habitat (Py sek et al., 2012).”