Invasive Plants Have Unprecedented Ability to Pioneer New Continents and Climates

These species pose greater global risk than previously thought.

It's no secret that globalization, aided by climate change, is helping invasive species gain a foothold across the planet.  What came as something of a surprise to Virginia Tech researchers was just how mutable these invaders are.

The scientists discovered that invasive plant species are not only highly adaptive, they are essentially able to change in order to thrive on new continents and in different types of climates, challenging the assumption that species occupy the same environment in native and invasive ranges.

The study, by Jacob Barney, an associate professor in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences' Department of Plant Pathology, Physiology, and Weed Science and Dan Atwater, a lecturer in the Department of Biological Sciences at North Carolina State University and Barney's former post-doctoral advisee, was published Tuesday in Nature Ecology and Evolution, an online journal.

"This is important for both changing how we think about species and where they grow," said Barney, who is also a fellow in the Fralin Life Science Institute and an affiliate of the Global Change Center. "The findings also change our ability to predict where they will grow, and how they may respond in a changing climate. This could be a game-changer for invasive species risk assessment and conservation."

Atwater used data compiled by undergraduate Carissa Ervine, also an author on the paper, to test a long-held assumption in ecology -- that the climate limitations of plants do not change, which means we can predict where they will grow.  Small studies supported this supposition.  However, the Virginia Tech researchers blew this assumption away by testing more than 800 species using new models developed by Atwater and Barney.

"Some people would say that invasive species have different distributions in a new climate.  But we found they are occupying a wider range of new climates," said Atwater.  "Species are changing in their ecology when they move from one continent to another.  We should expect species to change, possibly permanently, when they cross continents."

The results have major consequences for applying environmental niche models to assess the risk of invasive species and for predicting species' responses to climate change.  Species capable of changing their ecology and the climates they call home may pose a challenge to researchers using native range data to forecast the distribution of invasive species.

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