Agricultural intensification is critical to meet global food demand, but intensification threatens native species and degrades ecosystems. Sustainable intensification (SI) is heralded as a new approach for enabling growth in agriculture while minimizing environmental impacts. However, the SI literature has overlooked a major environmental risk. Using data from eight countries on six continents,...

Eichhornia crassipes (Mart.) Solms is a free-floating aquatic macrophyte growing normally to a height of 0.5 m to 1 m. This weed causes, substantial economic and ecological harm, warranting its removal, lest the impacts of the weed should become permanent. From an ecological perspective, the most effective, management approach is to make use of the weed for various purposes. The present study o...

Seed germination is the key step for successful establishment, growth and further expansion of population especially for alien plants with annual life cycle. Traits like better adaptability and germination response were thought to be associated with plant invasion. However, there are not enough empirical studies correlating adaptation to environmental factors with germination response of alien ...

426 BioScience • May 2008 / Vol. 58 No. 5 www.biosciencemag.org T impact of introduced, invasive species on communities and ecosystems is one of today’s most pressing global environmental problems (Wilcove et al. 1998, Mack et al. 2000). Biological invasions are a leading cause of extinction and biodiversity loss (Wilcove et al. 1998), and invasive plants are permanently altering natural commun...

Nature in cities is concentrated in urban green spaces, which are key areas for urban biodiversity and also important areas to connect people with nature. To conserve urban biodiversity within these natural refugia, habitat restoration such as weed control and revegetation is often implemented. These actions are expected to benefit biodiversity, although species known to be affected by urbaniza...

We report the 3.16 Mb draft genome of Acinetobacter sp. strain BMW17, a Gram-negative bacterium in the class of Gammaproteobacteria, isolated from the rhizospheric region of Phragmites karka, an invasive weed in Chilika Lake, Odisha, India. The strain BMW17(T) is capable of degrading cellulose and is also an efficient plant growth promoter that can be useful for various phytoremedial and commer...