Studies of pairwise interactions have shown that an alien plant can affect the pollination of a native plant, this effect being mediated by shared pollinators. Here we use a manipulative field experiment, to investigate the impact of the alien plant Impatiens glandulifera on an entire community of coflowering native plants. Visitation and pollen transport networks were constructed to compare re...

6 The highlands and mountains of Iceland (defined here as areas located above 400 m a.s.l) are one of the largest remaining wilderness areas in Europe. The present study was aimed to provide the first comprehensive and up-to-date data on non-native plant species from these areas. The study was aimed to answer the following questions: (1) How many non-native vascular plant species inhabit highla...

Effects of roads on plant communities are not well known in cold-climate mountain ecosystems, where road building and development are expected to increase in future decades. Knowledge of the sensitivity of mountain plant communities to disturbance by roads is however important for future conservation purposes. We investigate the effects of roads on species richness and composition, including th...

Using dataset of 508 transects of 50 m2, we assessed changes in the invasion level of alien plant species in semi-natural agricultural habitats in three study years (2001, 2005 and 2010) in four geographical regions of Finland. In addition, the impact of environmental factors on the occurrence of the most common neophytes (alien species introduced after the 17th century) and the impact of neoph...

The native plants of remote tropical islands have been frequently characterized as poor competitors against seemingly more aggressive alien species. Does this "weak competitor" characterization relate to some real adaptive consequences of island isolation and endemism, or does the generally concurrent presence of introduced ungulates and other forms of recurrent human disturbance also act to en...

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...

Ren, H.; Guo, Q.; Liu, H.; Li, J.; Zhang, Q.; Xu, H., and Xu, F., 2014. Patterns of alien plant invasion across coastal bay areas in southern China. Journal of Coastal Research, 30(3), 448–455. Coconut Creek (Florida), ISSN 0749-0208. An understanding of the ways in which levels of invasions by alien species are correlated with environmental factors is helpful to manage the negative impacts of ...

Alien plant invaders significantly threaten native community diversity, although it is poorly understood whether invasion initiates a linear or non-linear loss of resident species. Where low abundances of an invader have little impact on native species diversity, then a threshold level may exist, above which native communities rapidly decline. Our aim was to assess the broadscale effects of an ...

Fire management practices affect alien plant invasions in diverse ways. I considered the impact of six fire management practices on alien invasions: fire suppression, forest fuel reduction, prescription burning in crown-fire ecosystems, fuel breaks, targeting of noxious aliens, and postfire rehabilitation. Most western United States forests have had fire successfully excluded for unnaturally lo...

The introduction of alien plants into a new range can result in the loss of co-evolved symbiotic organisms, such as mycorrhizal fungi, that are essential for normal plant physiological functions. Prior studies of mycorrhizal associations in alien plants have tended to focus on individual plant species on a case-by-case basis. This approach limits broad scale understanding of functional shifts a...