Predicting invasion winners and losers under climate change.

Abstract

Invasive plant species are human-introduced, nonnative, and damaging. They can restructure natural habitats, change community composition, disrupt food webs, and degrade ecosystem services. Global climatic changes are often thought to exacerbate invasions (1), but no consensus exists over the generality of this phenomenon (2). As a consequence, anticipating areas of high invasion risk or decreased impact in the future is still uncertain. By combining experimental biogeography with demographic models, Merow et al. (3) develop climate driven process-based models to predict population growth or decline under current and future climate scenarios for two established and damaging invasive plant species in New England, United States. They find that one invasive species will likely perform better, whereas the other will do worse in areas that are currently occupied. Forecasting the distribution and performance of invasive species under a changing climate comes with particular challenges. Invasive species have not had time to colonize all favorable habitats available in the nonnative range. This nonequilibrium situation is problematic for correlative species distribution models, which may then use incomplete occurrences in the nonnative range as inputs for predicting suitable climatic conditions. However, predictions can be improved by using occurrence data from the native range (4). A more concerning challenge is that invasives may be able to establish in environmental conditions the species has not encountered in the native range (4⇓⇓–7), even if those conditions occur but are unoccupied in the native range (6). Niche … [↵][1]1To whom correspondence should be addressed. Email: buckleyy{at}tcd.ie. [1]: #xref-corresp-1-1