Trends in Ecology & Evolution
What have exotic plant invasions taught us over the past 20 years?
Introduction
The 20-year lifespan of TREE corresponds with a booming economy of invasive research. Commented on by Charles Darwin in the Origin of Species [1], organized by Elton [2] and modernized by Mack et al. [3] and by Sax et al. [4], the study of invasive organisms is now a growth industry in ecology and evolution. Attempts to unravel the mystery of why some invasive species can undergo profound shifts in ecological fortune, from being minor components of their native communities to becoming overwhelming dominants of invaded communities (Figure 1), has catalyzed important advances in the disciplines of ecology and evolution.
Here, we discuss our subjective perspective on the changes wrought by the study of invasive organisms. The specific areas of research that we highlight reflect our own biases and focus specifically on insights gained from the study of exotic plant invasions (Box 1). Our treatment is by no means exhaustive, and our opinions on the past 20 years of progress are just that; opinions.
Section snippets
Evolutionary ecology
Evolutionary biologists have long recognized exotic plant introductions as an unprecedented biogeographical experiment in evolutionary biology. Well before the first publication of TREE in 1986, there was great interest in studying species introductions as a way to understand the evolutionary processes that are associated with the colonization of new environments. These early studies investigated the evolutionary potential of weeds, and suggested that they undergo genetically based adaptation
Coevolutionary relationships among species
Twenty years ago, a Gleasonian ‘individualistic’ (e.g. communities are merely the product of the species that happen to disperse to a particular area and that have shared adaptations to an abiotic environment [24]) perspective on the forces that organize plant communities had yet to be challenged. Today, processes that Gleason advocated as being important to community structure, such as chance colonization events, local adaptation and resource competition, are still viewed as significant, but a
Ecosystems
Twenty years ago, just as evolutionary biology and ecology were often isolated from each other, so too were ecosystem ecology and population biology. Ecosystem ecologists approached their field from a systems perspective, often seeking to determine rates for processes that were thought of as ‘black boxes’. At the same time, population ecologists were concerned with demography and population growth, ignoring the potential for these processes to feed back to, and to be affected by, ecosystem
Conclusions
Apart from stimulating advances in several key areas of ecology, the rapid growth in invasion research over the past 20 years has helped catalyze a healthy fusion between fields and subdisciplines that have historically operated in isolation. Given that the success of exotics is often attributed to some change or release in a regulating factor in the new range that might constrain abundance in areas where plants are native, future advances are likely to come from comparative biogeographical
Acknowledgements
J.L.M. was supported by NSF grants OPP-0296208 and DEB-0296175 and from a fellowship from the Catalunya PIV while in residence at the Institut de Ciència i Technologia Ambientals, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. R.M.C. was supported by NSF grant DEB-0236061, NSF International Programs, DOD SERDP, USDA 04-JV-11222044-235, and USDA NRI 2003-01823.
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