Invasive Rosa rugosa populations outperform native populations, but some populations have greater invasive potential than others

Shuping Zhang,Wenhao Gan,Maike Isermann,Martin Breed

doi:10.1038/s41598-018-23974-3

Shuping Zhang, Wenhao Gan + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-018-23974-3

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Abstract

Increased performance of invasive plant species in their introduced range vs. their native range has been previously documented. However, performance differences among invasive populations have rarely been explored, despite this information being central to understanding the evolution of invasiveness as well as being a useful basis to inform management of invasive species. To examine variation in performance among populations of Rosa rugosa in its introduced range, and whether introduced populations perform better than native populations, we quantified growth and reproductive traits in five invasive populations in northwest Europe and two native and declining populations in China. Overall, we found that the introduced R. rugosa populations we sampled performed significantly better than the sampled native populations for growth and reproductive traits (2 to 4 fold increase). However, there was significant variation for most traits among the five invasive populations, demonstrating that some introduced populations we sampled were more successful invaders than others. Our findings provide a useful foundation for management of invasive R. rugosa in Europe, and support the recent call for more intra-species research in invasive species biology.

Highlights

Increased performance of invasive plants in their invasive range has been well documented[1,2], with many performance comparisons between invasive and native species pairs[3]
We studied five naturalized invasive R. rugosa populations in northwest Europe and two native populations in China to explore patterns of performance trait differentiation between native and invasive populations
We focused on the following questions: (1) Whether our sampled introduced R. rugosa populations perform better than the sampled native populations? (2) How heterogeneous is the performance of the sampled introduced populations? (3) Which traits contributed to the performance differences among the sampled introduced populations? By answering these questions, we identify which introduced populations are most invasive and which traits are indicative of this invasiveness

Summary

Introduction

Increased performance of invasive plants in their invasive range has been well documented[1,2], with many performance comparisons between invasive and native species pairs[3]. Most previous studies on performance differences between invasive and native populations have been done on short-lived plants (e.g. herbs, grasses) or on the early life stages of woody species[11,12,13] Traits such as plant size, height and reproduction output have rarely been studied in woody invasive plants. Its native range includes China, the Korean Peninsula, Japan and northwards to the Kamchatka peninsula, where it is sensitive to environment change, habitat loss due to human building activities[17,18,19,20] It has been listed as an endangered species in China due to a rapid decline in the number of populations[21,22,23]. In 2001, 16 European countries had records of naturalized R. rugosa populations[24]

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