Abstract
In an era of climate change, biological invasions by alien species represent one of the main anthropogenic drivers of global environmental change. The present study, using an ensemble modelling approach, has mapped current and future global distribution of the invasive Leucanthemum vulgare (Ox-eye Daisy) and predicted the invasion hotspots under climate change. The current potential distribution of Ox-eye Daisy coincides well with the actual distribution records, thereby indicating robustness of our model. The model predicted a global increase in the suitable habitat for the potential invasion of this species under climate change. Oceania was shown to be the high-risk region to the potential invasion of this species under both current and future climate change scenarios. The results revealed niche conservatism for Australia and Northern America, but contrastingly a niche shift for Africa, Asia, Oceania and Southern America. The global distribution modelling and risk assessment of Ox-eye Daisy has immediate implications in mitigating its invasion impacts under climate change, as well as predicting the global invasion hotspots and developing region-specific invasion management strategies. Interestingly, the contrasting patterns of niche dynamics shown by this invasive plant species provide novel insights towards disentangling the different operative mechanisms underlying the process of biological invasions at the global scale.
Highlights
In an era of the climate change, biological invasions by invasive alien species represents one of the main anthropogenic drivers of global environmental change[1]
The final ensemble model obtained by the combination of various models had area under the curve (AUC) value of 0.97, true skills statistics (TSS) value of 0.850 and Cohen’s KAPPA (KAPPA) value of 0.845 indicating that the model performed better in predicting the suitable habitat area for the species (Supplementary Table S1)
The potential distribution map created by the ensemble model, based on the current climatic conditions and occurrence records of Leucanthemum showed that under the current climatic conditions, about 20,419,818 km[2] (14.04%) of the total area across the globe is suitable for potential invasion by Leucanthemum
Summary
In an era of the climate change, biological invasions by invasive alien species represents one of the main anthropogenic drivers of global environmental change[1]. Many research studies have reported niche shifts to be rare in the invaded regions of invasive alien species[27,28]; but some recent studies have reported the frequent occurrence of niche shifts among the invasive alien plants[24,29,30,31] The reason behind these contrasting results mostly lie in conceptual differences associated with environmental availability[32], as several studies have taken into consideration the nature of environment[28,33,34], while others have not[29,35,36]. Recent studies have reported that the performance of each algorithm varies significantly, thereby, making the choice of the appropriate modelling alogarithm even more difficult To overcome these limitations, there is an emerging scientific consensus to simultaneously apply several algorithms (e.g. ensemble modelling40,41) within a consensus modelling framework[42,43]. The species is a high altitudinal invasive species invading the subalpine mountainous regions across the globe, resulting in the invasion of natural ecosystems harbouring endemic species[2,52]
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