Abstract

The spread of invasive alien plants has considerable environmental and economic consequences, and is one of the most challenging ecological problems. The spread of invasive alien plant species depends largely on long-distance dispersal, which is typically linked with human activity. The increasing domination of the internet will have impacts upon almost all components of our lives, including potential consequences for the spread of invasive species. To determine whether the rise of Internet commerce has any consequences for the spread of invasive alien plant species, we studied the sale of thirteen of some of the most harmful Europe invasive alien plant species sold as decorative plants from twenty-eight large, well known gardening shops in Poland that sold both via the Internet and through traditional customer sales. We also analyzed temporal changes in the number of invasive plants sold in the largest Polish internet auction portal. When sold through the Internet invasive alien plant species were transported considerably longer distances than for traditional sales. For internet sales, seeds of invasive alien plant species were transported further than were live plants saplings; this was not the case for traditional sales. Also, with e-commerce the shape of distance distribution were flattened with low skewness comparing with traditional sale where the distributions were peaked and right-skewed. Thus, e-commerce created novel modes of long-distance dispersal, while traditional sale resembled more natural dispersal modes. Moreover, analysis of sale in the biggest Polish internet auction portal showed that the number of alien specimens sold via the internet has increased markedly over recent years. Therefore internet commerce is likely to increase the rate at which ecological communities become homogenized and increase spread of invasive species by increasing the rate of long distance dispersal.

Highlights

  • Species invasions are both a result and cause of global ecological changes

  • We chose 13 invasive species that are widespread in Poland, some of which are amongst the most harmful invasive plant species in Europe [23], and which were available through garden shops and internet auctions

  • Mean skewness of distance distribution of plants sold via internet was lower than for plants sold in traditional shops

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Summary

Introduction

Species invasions are both a result and cause of global ecological changes. Numerous studies have shown that invasive alien plant species can often establish and change edaphic conditions in new habitats, change their structure or even create novel invasivedominated ecosystems [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8]. Most plant dispersal is over a short range and it has a right skewed leptokurtic distribution, with a tail of few individuals travelling very long distances [9], [10]. These few long distance dispersers are important in colonization of new areas and in determining the rate of geographical range spread [10], [11]. This tail is the most important factor shaping the invasion mechanisms of alien plant species. The long tail of extreme movements by invasive species is often attributable to various forms of human transportation, which allows alien species to cross geographical barriers and to colonize new localities as well as escape from lag phase of colonization [5], [12,13,14,15]

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