Invasive exotic plants are aggressively competing with native plant species in Florida. In some situations, infested habitats will no longer support native wildlife, and endangered plants and animals are being pushed closer to extinction. Managers of these natural areas are finding herbicide treatments to be the most effective and economical way to control exotic plants with minimal risk to nat...

Weed Risk Assessment (WRA) methods for evaluating invasiveness in plants have evolved rapidly in the last two decades. Many WRA tools exist, but none were specifically designed to screen ornamental plants prior to being released into the environment. To be accepted as a tool to evaluate ornamental plants for the nursery industry, it is critical that a WRA tool accurately predicts non-invasivene...

Invasions by alien plants provide a unique opportunity to examine competitive interactions among plants. While resource competition has long been regarded as a major mechanism responsible for successful invasions, given a well-known capacity for many invaders to become dominant and reduce plant diversity in the invaded communities, few studies have measured resource competition directly or have...

Weeds As Examples Weeds provide good examples to clarify what is meant by an invasive species because most people have a concept of what constitutes a " weed. " Invasion can be thought of as a process that in our example, a plant must go through to become a successful, yet harmful invader. Several barriers must be overcome for a plant to be considered an invasive weed. Invasive weeds are invasi...

Generalized mutualisms are often predicted to be resilient to changes in partner identity. Variation in mutualism-related traits between native and invasive species however, can exacerbate the spread of invasive species ('invasional meltdown') if invasive partners strongly interact. Here we show how invasion by a seed-dispersing ant (Myrmica rubra) promotes recruitment of a co-introduced invasi...

Negative or positive feedback between arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) and host plants can contribute to plant species interactions, but how this feedback affects plant invasion or resistance to invasion is not well known. Here we tested how alterations in AMF community induced by an invasive plant species generate feedback to the invasive plant itself and affect subsequent interactions betwe...

Conservationists have frequently touted the merits of increased landscape connectivity, usually focusing on the effi cacy of conservation linkages (corridors) for maintaining viable populations of target species. An often-mentioned, but still greatly understudied, concern is that increased landscape connectivity via linkages may also aid the movement of undesired species. Th is paper provides c...