Competition between species is ubiquitous in nature and therefore widely studied in ecology through experiment and theory. One of the central questions is under which conditions a (rare) invader can establish itself in a landscape dominated by a resident species at carrying capacity. Applying the same question with the roles of the invader and resident reversed leads to the principle that "mutu...

Invasive non-native species represent a leading threat to global freshwater biodiversity and crayfish frequently cause extensive ecological damage. However, the extent which their impact: (1) depends on invader identity (2) differs from natural state with native remains unclear. Comparison of functional responses invasive represents promising approach in this regard. Here, we explored whether f...

Predicting ecological impacts of invasive species and identifying potentially damaging future invaders are research priorities. Since damage by invaders is characterized by their depletion of resources, comparisons of the 'functional response' (FR; resource uptake rate as a function of resource density) of invaders and natives might predict invader impact. We tested this by comparing FRs of the...

Limited dispersal distance, whether due to vegetative growth or localized 2 reproduction, generates spatial clustering. Many invasive plants, in particular, propagate clonally and aggregate spatially. Local dispersal concentrates intraspecific interactions 4 within clusters, while most between-species interactions occur near cluster boundaries. Spread of a spatially clustered, invasive plant th...

In the event of an environmental disturbance, dispersal of native taxa may provide species and genetic diversity to ecosystems, increasing the likelihood that there will be species and genotypes present that are less vulnerable to the disturbance. This may allow communities to maintain functioning during a disturbance and may be particularly important when the perturbation is novel to the syste...

A recent analysis of decades of US customs intercepts has revealed which ants had an opportunity to become established in the United States, providing insights into the requisite traits that enable an ant species to become a successful invader.

invasions. Refuges from the invader often remain at some place in a native species' range. Whether native species can stably persist within these refuges is an open question. But in the short term, the number of invasions has far exceeded the number of resulting extinctions. This result has emphasized that most ecological systems are not 'saturated' with species. Two puzzles Nearly all problema...

Temporal fluctuations in recruitment are involved in two distinct coexistence mechanisms, the storage effect and relative nonlinearity of competition, which may act simultaneously to stabilize species coexistence. It is shown that comparisons of recruitment variation between species at high versus low densities can test whether these mechanisms are responsible for stable coexistence. Moreover, ...

Both community ecology and conservation biology seek further understanding of factors governing the advance of an invasive species. We model biological invasion as an individual-based, stochastic process on a two-dimensional landscape. An ecologically superior invader and a resident species compete for space preemptively. Our general model includes the basic contact process and a variant of the...