Determinants of plant establishment and invasion are a key issue in ecology and evolution. Although establishment success varies substantially among species, the importance of species traits and extrinsic factors as determinants of establishment in existing communities has remained difficult to prove in observational studies because they can be confounded and mask each other. Therefore, we cond...

1. A prevalent question in the study of plant invasions has been whether or not invasions can be explained on the basis of traits. Despite many attempts, a synthetic view of multi-trait differences between alien and native species is not yet available. 2. We compiled a database of three ecologically important traits (specific leaf area, typical maximum canopy height, individual seed mass) for 4...

BACKGROUND AND AIMS Flowering phenology is a potentially important component of success of alien species, since elevated fecundity may enhance invasiveness. The flowering patterns of invasive alien plant species and related natives were studied in three regions with Mediterranean-type climate: California, Spain and South Africa's Cape region. METHODS A total of 227 invasive-native pairs were ...

Background and purpose: Invasion by alien plant species is considered as one of major threats to biodiversity. Actual invasion of different habitats in particular country is important for understanding processes that are important in invasion ecology as well as for the nature conservation. Materials and methods: Vegetation relevés stored in a database Vegetation of Slovenia were translated into...

Alien invasive species have been a seriously environment issue in the whole world. The ecological damages and economic influences of alien invasive species are analyzed in this article, and the government is suggested to strengthen the quarantine services, strictly manage the intentional introduction of alien species, and implement the risk supervision system for the introduction of alien species.

Invasive alien species spread through the environment and threaten native biodiversity, assisted by the absence of natural enemies. Alien species may also carry pathogens, which can be transmitted to native species. About half of the known endangered species are under threat from invasive alien species. The Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity in 2008 invited rele...

This paper describes the use of probabilistic graphical models, in particular Bayesian networks (BN), for the detection of two problem invasive alien plants, C. odorata and L. camara, from the recently-launched 8-band Worldview-2 satellite imagery acquired on 26 September 2010 over central Swaziland. The main objective of this work was to apply and evaluate the efficacy of the very high resolut...

Aim Introduced alien species are frequently implicated in ecosystem disruption and biodiversity loss, but some ecologists have recently argued that efforts to manage ecosystems should be refocused on known problematic species without regard to whether such species are native or alien. This argument rests on the premise that native and alien species in general do not differ in their impacts. Alt...

Although it has long been acknowledged that many native and alien weeds colonising disturbed habitats share similar attributes, differences associated with biogeographic origin have been recognised for over 50 years [1]. Thompson and Davis [2], however, make the point that where plants are passengers rather than drivers of environmental change, one might expect selection for similar characteris...

Abstract The novel-weapons and homeland-security hypotheses are based on the idea that aliens natives not adapted to each other’s allelochemicals as they did co-evolve. However, only a few studies have tested this, it remains unclear how important co-evolutionary history is in determining strength of allelopathic interactions between natives. Here, we for potential pairwise effects other five a...