Conservation scientists and practitioners have long recognized that not all non native species pose a threat to biodiversity, yet some ecologists still fail to grasp this message (1). The conclusions drawn by Thomas and Palmer (2) that non native plant species are not a threat to floral diversity in Britain highlight how this lack of understanding can lead to inappropriate analyses and mis lead...

Does Carpobrotus edulis have an impact on native plants? How do C. edulis' soil residual effects affect the maintenance of native populations? What is the extent of interspecific competition in its invasion process? In order to answer those questions, we established pure and mixed cultures of native species and C. edulis on soil collected from invaded and native areas of Mediterranean coastal d...

Land managers need cost-effective and informative tools for non-native plant species management. Many local, state, and federal agencies adopted mapping systems designed to collect comparable data for the early detection and monitoring of non-native species. We compared mapping information to statistically rigorous, plot-based methods to better understand the benefits and compatibility of the t...

A growing body of literature has led to the debate in invasion biology whether exotic species perform within communities differently than native taxa due to inherent advantages. To address this issue, the population dynamics of native and exotic plant species were assessed from a 48-year record of permanent plot data from the Hutcheson Memorial Forest Center (New Jersey, USA) to determine rate ...

At large spatial scales, exotic and native plant diversity exhibit a strong positive relationship. This may occur because exotic and native species respond similarly to processes that influence diversity over large geographical areas. To test this hypothesis, we compared exotic and native species-area relationships within six North American ecoregions. We predicted and found that within ecoregi...

Recent decades have witnessed the growing use of non-native plants in Iran while their use is very challenging and high-cost for the country. This raised a new approach in recent decades towards the use of native plants. Native species are precious because they possess the main ecological factors and they are already compatible with the region. Accordingly, this research was conducted to evalua...

Background Alien or non-indigenous species are now considered a major element of global environmental change (Vitousek et al. 1996; Mack et al. 2000). Invasive species pose a significant threat to many ecosystems worldwide by their direct and indirect impacts to native species and by their effects on broader scale ecological patterns and processes (Cole and Landres 1996). Biological invasions h...

Spatial heterogeneity may have differential effects on the distribution of native and nonnative plant species richness. We examined the effects of spatial heterogeneity on native and nonnative plant species richness distributions in the central part of Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado, USA. Spatial heterogeneity around vegetation plots was characterized using landscape metrics, environmen...

Enemy release is frequently posed as a main driver of invasiveness of alien species. However, an experimental multi-species test examining performance and herbivory of invasive alien, non-invasive alien and native plant species in the presence and absence of natural enemies is lacking. In a common garden experiment in Switzerland, we manipulated exposure of seven alien invasive, eight alien non...

Low volume aerial phosphite applications has been used in recent years at rates of up to 24 kg ha" to protect native plant species and communities threatened by Phytophthora cinnamomi while the recommended rate for spray to run-off phosphite application is 5 g L·'. Phosphite uptake and in planta phosphite concentrations in native plant species may vary considerably between species and with appl...