Abstract
Biological invasions and climate pose two of the most important challenges facing global biodiversity. Certainly, climate change may intensify the impacts of invasion by allowing invasive plants to increase in abundance and further expand their ranges. For example, most aquatic alien plants in temperate climate are of tropical and subtropical origins and the northern limits of their ranges are generally determined by minimum winter temperatures, and they will probably expand their distributions northwards if climate warms. The distribution of five invasive aquatic plants in freshwater systems across continents were investigated. Their global distributions in the current climate were modeled using a recently developed ensemble species distribution model approach, specifically designed to account for dispersal constraints on the distributions of range-expanding species. It was found that the species appear capable of substantial range expansion, and that low winter temperature is the strongest factor limiting their invasion. These findings can be used to identify areas at risk of recently introduction of neophytes, and develop future monitoring programs for aquatic ecosystems, prioritizing control efforts, which enables the effective use of ecological niche models to forecast aquatic invasion in other geographic regions.
Highlights
Freshwater ecosystems are vulnerable to both alterations in climate and biological invasion [1]
No climatically suitable areas for the species were identified in the Andean cordillera in Chile, but a high suitability in southeast North America, possible causing an invasion threat where there are sources of standing water
In Australia, the suitable areas were located in the north (E. crassipes, P. stratiotes, and S. molesta) and east (M. aquaticum)
Summary
Freshwater ecosystems are vulnerable to both alterations in climate and biological invasion [1]. As modifications in climate alter aquatic ecosystems by increasing nutrient loading from the catchment areas to the lakes [4,5], influencing streamflow, amount and duration of ice cover, water quality and chemistry, aquatic invasive species are predicted to invade previously uninhabitable areas [6,7], and even aquarium plants that are not currently invasive would likely become invasive due to the fact that most plants traded in aquaria are of tropical and subtropical origins [8,9,10]. To generate potential distributions of the species in their native and invaded ranges, presence-background modeling (presence-only) were used, drawing the background points (pseudo-absences), using a biological-informed pseudo-absence selection approach [82] This allows algorithms to contrast the environment at the species occurrence locations (e.g., data selected from suitable areas) against a sample of background environmental conditions (i.e., pseudo-absences). It was assumed that the key environmental constraints on plant distributions are mostly determined by: mean minimum temperature of the coldest month ranges between
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