Invasive aquatic plants are an ever-growing nuisance to water resources in Mississippi and the rest of the United States. These plants are generally introduced from other parts of the world, some for beneficial or horticultural uses. Once introduced, they can interfere with navigation, impede water flow, increase flood risk, reduce hydropower generation, and increase evapotranspirational losses...

Biological invasions are widely acknowledged as a major threat to global biodiversity. Species from all major taxonomic groups have become invasive. The range of impacts of invasive taxa and the overall magnitude of the threat is increasing. Plants comprise the biggest and best-studied group of invasive species. There is a growing debate; however, regarding the nature of the alien plant threat-...

Evan Siemann and William E. Rogers Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Rice University, Houston, TX 77005, U.S.A. Correspondence: Evan Siemann. E-mail: [email protected] Abstract Invasive plants are often more vigorous in their introduced ranges than in their native ranges. This may re ̄ect an innate superiority of plants from some habitats or an escape from their enemies. Another hyp...

Invasive species richness often is negatively correlated with native species richness at the small spatial scale of sampling plots, but positively correlated in larger areas. The pattern at small scales has been interpreted as evidence that native plants can competitively exclude invasive species. Large-scale patterns have been understood to result from environmental heterogeneity, among other ...

3 Corresponding author: [email protected]; 828-667-5261 ext. 118; Fax: 828-667-9097 ABSTRACT: Invasive, non-native plants threaten forest ecosystems by reducing native plant species richness and potentially altering ecosystem processes. Seed dispersal is critical for successful invasion and range expansion by non-native plants; dispersal is likely to be enhanced if they can successfully comp...

A recent study by Stohlgren & Rejmánek (SR: Stohlgren TJ, Rejmánek M. 2014 Biol. Lett. 10. (doi:10.1098/rsbl.2013.0939)) purported to test the generality of a recent finding of scale-dependent effects of invasive plants on native diversity; dominant invasive plants decreased the intercept and increased the slope of the species-area relationship. SR (2014) find little correlation between invasiv...

With the introduction and establishment of exotic species, most ecosystems now contain both native and exotic plants and herbivores. Recent research identifies several factors that govern how specialist herbivores switch host plants upon introduction. Predicting the feeding ecology and impacts of introduced generalist species, however, remains difficult. Here, we examine how plant geographic or...

www.frontiersinecology.org © The Ecological Society of America O need only peruse a nursery catalog or visit a local gardening center to realize the enormous array of plant choices available to the everyday American gardener. Unfortunately, this wealth of consumer choices comes at a steep cost. Non-native plants introduced through the horticulture trade often become invasive (Mack and Lonsdale ...

Research on biological invasions has produced detailed theories describing range expansions of introduced populations. However, current knowledge of evolutionary factors associated with invasive range expansions, especially those related to rapid evolution of long-lived organisms, is still rudimentary. Here, we used a system of six 40-year-old invasive pine populations that originated from repl...

Biological invasions can affect ecosystems across a wide spectrum of bioclimatic conditions. Therefore, it is often important to systematically monitor the spread of species over a broad region. Remote sensing has been an important tool for large-scale ecological studies in the past three decades, but it was not commonly used to study alien invasive plants until the mid 1990s. We synthesize pre...