Native parasitic plants: Biological control for plant invasions?

Biotic resistance to plant invasions? Native herbivores prefer non-native plants

John D. Parker and Mark E. Hay* School of Biology, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA 30332–0230, USA *Correspondence: E-mail: [email protected] Abstract In contrast to expectations of the enemy release hypothesis, but consistent with the notion of biotic resistance, we found that native generalist crayfishes preferred exotic over native freshwater plants by a 3 : 1 ratio wh...

Nanotechnology for parasitic plant control

Beyond the ecological: biological invasions alter natural selection on a native plant species.

Biological invasions can have strong ecological effects on native communities by altering ecosystem functions, species interactions, and community composition. Even though these ecological effects frequently impact the population dynamics and fitness of native species, the evolutionary consequences of biological invasions have received relatively little attention. Here, I show that invasions im...

Predicting biological invasions Development and application of a model for the analysis of plant invasions

The principle of the model is a dissection of an idealized invasion process into invasion steps and stages (INVASS model). The basic structure can be depicted as a staircase: five invasion stages (0 to 4) are connected through four invasion steps (1 to 4). The stages describe the status of the species during the invasion, whereas the steps illustrate the processes. The invasion steps summarize ...

Opposing effects of native and exotic herbivores on plant invasions.

Exotic species are widely assumed to thrive because they lack natural enemies in their new ranges. However, a meta-analysis of 63 manipulative field studies including more than 100 exotic plant species revealed that native herbivores suppressed exotic plants, whereas exotic herbivores facilitated both the abundance and species richness of exotic plants. Both outcomes suggest that plants are esp...