Assessing the current and potential future distribution of four invasive forest plants in Minnesota, U.S.A., using mixed sources of data

Jason R Reinhardt,William Lazarus,Matthew B Russell,Senait Senay

doi:10.1038/s41598-020-69539-1

Jason R Reinhardt, William Lazarus + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-69539-1

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Abstract

Invasive plants are an ongoing subject of interest in North American forests, owing to their impacts on forest structure and regeneration, biodiversity, and ecosystem services. An important component of studying and managing forest invaders involves knowing where the species are, or could be, geographically located. Temporal and environmental context, in conjunction with spatially-explicit species occurrence information, can be used to address this need. Here, we predict the potential current and future distributions of four forest plant invaders in Minnesota: common buckthorn (Rhamnus cathartica), glossy buckthorn (Frangula alnus), garlic mustard (Alliaria petiolata), and multiflora rose (Rosa multiflora). We assessed the impact of two different climate change scenarios (IPCC RCP 6.0 and 8.5) at two future timepoints (2050s and 2070s) as well as the importance of occurrence data sources on the potential distribution of each species. Our results suggest that climate change scenarios considered here could result in a potential loss of suitable habitat in Minnesota for both buckthorn species and a potential gain for R. multiflora and A. petiolata. Differences in predictions as a result of input occurrence data source were most pronounced in future climate projections.

Highlights

Invasive plants are an ongoing subject of interest in North American forests, owing to their impacts on forest structure and regeneration, biodiversity, and ecosystem services
Frangula alnus, which had 140 privatelyreported plant locations demonstrated the lowest overall κ and correlation coefficients in the public and public + private data source models, but a similar pattern was not found in the performance results for A. petiolata, which demonstrated a fairly large proportion of privately-reported plant locations (342 out of n = 1,082, Table 1)
Temperature variables were consistently important for R. cathartica, F. alnus, and R. multiflora, but not for A. petiolata

Summary

Introduction

Invasive plants are an ongoing subject of interest in North American forests, owing to their impacts on forest structure and regeneration, biodiversity, and ecosystem services. Alliaria petiolata is rare among nonnative herbaceous invasive plants in that it is able to successfully invade intact and shaded forest u nderstories[23], giving it the ability to affect forests beyond edges and gaps It competes with native understory v egetation[24,25,26] and some data suggests it may alter tree seedling abundance and composition[27]. Rosa multiflora is a woody shrub which can form dense thickets in areas where it becomes established, inhibiting the growth of native species and making traversal by wildlife or humans difficult[30] These two species have the capacity to alter forest ecosystems through impacts on regeneration abundance and composition, not dissimilar from some of the impacts of buckthorn. All four species described here have elicited concern from conservation groups, state agencies, and land managers in multiple states across the upper Midwest

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