Abstract
Roadsides are major pathways of plant invasions in mountain regions. However, the increasing importance of tourism may also turn hiking trails into conduits of non-native plant spread to remote mountain landscapes. Here, we evaluated the importance of such trails for plant invasion in five protected mountain areas of southern central Chile. We therefore sampled native and non-native species along 17 trails and in the adjacent undisturbed vegetation. We analyzed whether the number and cover of non-native species in local plant assemblages is related to distance to trail and a number of additional variables that characterize the abiotic and biotic environment as well as the usage of the trail. We found that non-native species at higher elevations are a subset of the lowland source pool and that their number and cover decreases with increasing elevation and with distance to trails, although this latter variable only explained 4–8% of the variation in the data. In addition, non-native richness and cover were positively correlated with signs of livestock presence but negatively with the presence of intact forest vegetation. These results suggest that, at least in the region studied, hiking trails have indeed fostered non-native species spread to higher elevations, although less efficiently than roadsides. As a corollary, appropriate planning and management of trails could become increasingly important to control plant invasions into mountains in a world which is warming and where visitation and recreational use of mountainous areas is expected to increase.
Highlights
The distribution of non-native plant species in mountain ecosystems has received increasing attention over the last 15 years (Alexander et al 2011, 2016; Seipel et al 2016; Lembrechts et al 2017; Haider et al 2018; McDougall et al 2018)
Classifying the role of hiking trails for plant invasions into mountains as only moderate is motivated by the comparison of our results with equivalent findings along mountain roads, especially with respect to how the incidence and abundance of non-native species relates to proximity to these infrastructures
Our results indicate that a considerable number of nonnative species has already colonized the montane protected areas of southern central Chile
Summary
The distribution of non-native plant species in mountain ecosystems has received increasing attention over the last 15 years (Alexander et al 2011, 2016; Seipel et al 2016; Lembrechts et al 2017; Haider et al 2018; McDougall et al 2018). Several papers have already shown that encroachment of non-native plants into mountain environments may be fostered by a warming climate (Pauchard et al 2016; Dainese et al 2017, Carboni et al 2018) and is highly concentrated along the human traffic network (Seipel et al 2012; Lembrechts et al 2017; McDougall et al 2018). The human infrastructure thereby facilitates non-native plant spread because, first, the associated disturbance reduces the resistance of the resident vegetation against newcomers and releases resources, and, second, traffic along this infrastructure increases the probability of propagule transport (Kalwij et al 2008; Lembrechts et al 2017; Haider et al 2018)
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