Complex community responses underpin biodiversity change following invasion
Abstract
How do invasive species change native biodiversity? One reason why this long-standing question remains challenging to answer could be because the main focus of the invasion literature has been on shifts in species richness (a measure of alpha-diversity). As the underlying components of community structure-intraspecific aggregation, interspecific density and the species abundance distribution (SAD)-are potentially impacted in different ways during invasion, trends in species richness provide only limited insight into the mechanisms leading to biodiversity change. In addition, these impacts can be manifested in distinct ways at different spatial scales. Here we take advantage of the new Measurement of Biodiversity (MoB) framework to reanalyse data collected in an invasion front in the Brazilian Cerrado biodiversity hotspot. We show that, by using the MoB multi-scale approach, we are able to link reductions in species richness in invaded sites to restructuring in the SAD. This restructuring takes the form of lower evenness in sites invaded by pines relative to sites without pines. Shifts in aggregation also occur. There is a clear signature of spatial scale in biodiversity change linked to the presence of an invasive species. These results demonstrate how the MoB approach can play an important role in helping invasion ecologists, field biologists and conservation managers move towards a more mechanistic approach to detecting and interpreting changes in ecological systems following invasion.
Citation
Kortz , AR & Magurran , AE 2021 , ' Complex community responses underpin biodiversity change following invasion ' , Biological Invasions . https://doi.org/10.1007/s10530-021-02559-8
Publication
Biological Invasions
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
1387-3547Type
Journal article
Rights
Copyright © The Author(s) 2021. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Description
ARK thanks Ciência sem Fronteiras/Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES) for a fully funded PhD fellowship at the University of St Andrews (1091/13-1) and the School of Biology of the University of St Andrews. ARK acknowledges a Postdoctoral fellowship at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) funded by CAPES (88881.308367/2018-01) and AEM thanks the Leverhulme Trust (RPG-2019-402) for support.Collections
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