Abstract
Biological invasion is a serious threat to biodiversity and ecosystem function in nature reserves. However, the knowledge of the spatial patterns and underlying mechanisms of plant invasions in nature reserves is still limited. Based on a recent dataset on both invasive and native plants in 67 nature reserves of China, we used correlation, regression, and variation partitioning methods to statistically assess the relative roles of the “human activity,” “biotic acceptance,” and “environmental heterogeneity” hypotheses in explaining the geographic pattern of plant invasion. A total of 235 invasive plant species were compiled from 67 nature reserves. The high explanatory power of the human activity variables supported the human activity hypothesis. The biotic acceptance hypothesis was weakly supported since no significant correlations between climatic variables and invasion levels were found when the effects of the other factors were controlled. The environmental heterogeneity hypothesis was partially supported, since the number of native plants, representing environmental heterogeneity at fine-scale explained remarkable proportion of spatial variance of invasive plants but not that of the proportion of invasive plants. We predict that nature reserves with high plant diversity affected by rapid economic development and increasing temperature will face a serious threat of exotic plant invasion. In conclusion, our results provide crucial clues for understanding geographic variance of plant invasion in China’s nature reserves and spatial risk assessment.
Highlights
As an important component of global change, plant invasion has intensified with the rapid development of globalization (Roura-Pascual et al, 2021)
After controlling for the effect of environmental conditions, the variables to test the human activity hypothesis were found to be positively related to number of invasive plants (NIP) and relative invasive plant richness (RPR) (GDP and gross domestic product (GDP) per capita, GPC)
Regression, and variation partitioning analyses, we determined the relative roles of human activity, biotic acceptance, and environmental heterogeneity hypotheses in explaining geographic patterns of plant invasion levels in 67 China’s nature reserves
Summary
As an important component of global change, plant invasion has intensified with the rapid development of globalization (Roura-Pascual et al, 2021). According to the recent consensus network on 39 common hypotheses in invasion biology, five main clusters (propagule, Darwin, resource availability, biotic interaction, and trait) were revealed by a link-clustering algorithm (Enders et al, 2020). These three hypotheses, human activity, biotic acceptance, and environmental heterogeneity, belong to the clusters of propagule, Darwin, and resource availability, respectively. This indicates the weak similarity and overlap among them (Enders et al, 2020; Pyšek et al, 2020). We don’t consider the biotic resistance hypothesis because it generally works at local/community scales and has been frequently rejected at regional scales (Lonsdale, 1999; Beaury et al, 2020)
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