Elevated compositional change in plant assemblages linked to invasion
Abstract
Alien species are widely linked to biodiversity change, but the extent to which they are associated with the reshaping of ecological communities is not well understood. One possible mechanism is that assemblages where alien species are found exhibit elevated temporal turnover. To test this, we identified assemblages of vascular plants in the BioTIME database for those assemblages in which alien species are either present or absent and used the Jaccard measure to compute compositional dissimilarity between consecutive censuses. We found that, although alien species are typically rare in invaded assemblages, their presence is associated with an increase in the average rate of compositional change. These differences in compositional change between invaded and uninvaded assemblages are not linked to differences in species richness but rather to species replacement (turnover). Rapid compositional restructuring of assemblages is a major contributor to biodiversity change, and as such, our results suggest a role for alien species in bringing this about.
Citation
Kortz , A R , Moyes , F , Pivello , V R , Pyšek , P , Dornelas , M , Visconti , P & Magurran , A E 2023 , ' Elevated compositional change in plant assemblages linked to invasion ' , Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences , vol. 290 , no. 1998 , 20222450 . https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2022.2450
Publication
Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
0962-8452Type
Journal article
Description
Funding: This work was supported by the Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (CAPES/Brazil, grant no. 88881.308367/2018-01), the Czech Science Foundation (EXPRO grant no. 19-28807X), the Czech Academy of Sciences (grant no. RVO 67985939) as well as the Leverhulme Trust (grant no. RPG-2019-402).Collections
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