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Running off the road: roadside non-native plants invading mountain vegetation

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Abstract

Prevention is regarded as a cost-effective management action to avoid unwanted impacts of non-native species. However, targeted prevention can be difficult if little is known about the traits of successfully invading non-native species or habitat characteristics that make native vegetation more resistant to invasion. Here, we surveyed mountain roads in seven regions worldwide, to investigate whether different species traits are beneficial during primary invasion (i.e. spread of non-native species along roadside dispersal corridors) and secondary invasion (i.e. percolation from roadsides into natural adjacent vegetation), and to determine if particular habitat characteristics increase biotic resistance to invasion. We found primary invasion up mountain roads tends to be by longer lived, non-ruderal species without seed dispersal traits. For secondary invasion, we demonstrate that both traits of the non-native species and attributes of the receiving natural vegetation contribute to the extent of invasion. Non-native species that invade natural adjacent vegetation tend to be shade and moisture tolerant. Furthermore, non-native species invasion was greater when the receiving vegetation was similarly rich in native species. Our results show how mountain roads define which non-native species are successful; first by favouring certain traits in mountain roadsides (the key dispersal pathway to the top), and secondly by requiring a different set of traits when species invade the natural adjacent vegetation. While patterns in species traits were observed at a global level, regional abiotic and biotic variables largely generated region-specific levels of response, suggesting that management should be regionally driven.

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Acknowledgements

Neville Walsh (Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne) assisted with data collection in Australia, Laurenz Teuber in Norway, and Damiano Righetti collected the data in Switzerland. Data and contributions by LR and TS are supported by the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, U.S. Department of Agriculture Hatch: MONB00363. LC and AP acknowledge funding from ICM 05-002 and CONICYT PFB-023, which supports the Institute of Ecology and Biodiversity (IEB), and FONDECYT 1151007 and 1180205. JJL acknowledges funding by the Research Foundation—Flanders (FWO). BJN, Josh Averett and Kent Coe lead the data collection efforts in Oregon and funding was provided by the USDA Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Research Station. Conflict of Interest: The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Office of Environment and Heritage, P.O. Box 733, Queanbeyan, NSW, 2620, Australia

    Keith L. McDougall & Genevieve T. Wright

  2. Department of Ecology, Environment and Evolution, La Trobe University, Wodonga, VIC, 3690, Australia

    Keith L. McDougall

  3. Centre of Excellence on Plant and Vegetation Ecology, CDE C.007, University of Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium

    Jonas Lembrechts

  4. Department of Land Resources and Environmental Sciences, Montana State University, Bozeman, MT, 59717, USA

    Lisa J. Rew & Tim Seipel

  5. Geobotany and Botanical Garden, Institute of Biology, Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, Halle (Saale), Germany

    Sylvia Haider

  6. German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) Halle-Jena-Leipzig, Leipzig, Germany

    Sylvia Haider

  7. Departamento de Botánica, Facultad de Ciencias Naturales y Oceanográficas, Universidad de Concepción, Concepción, Chile

    Lohengrin A. Cavieres

  8. Instituto de Ecología y Biodiversidad (IEB), Santiago, Chile

    Christoph Kueffer

  9. Institute of Integrative Biology, Department of Environmental Systems Science, ETH Zurich, 8092, Zurich, Switzerland

    Christoph Kueffer

  10. Research Institute for Nature and Forest – INBO, Havenlaan 88 bus 73, 1000, Brussels, Belgium

    Ann Milbau

  11. USDA Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Research Station, La Grande, OR, 97850, USA

    Bridgett J. Naylor

  12. Grupo de Ecología de Invasiones, INIBIOMA, CONICET, Universidad Nacional del Comahue, Av. Pionero, 2335, C.P. 8400, Bariloche, Argentina

    Martin A. Nuñez

  13. Laboratorio de Invasiones Biológicas (LIB), Facultad de Ciencias Forestales, Universidad de Concepción, Casilla 160-C, Concepción, Chile

    Anibal Pauchard

  14. Institute of Ecology and Biodiversity (IEB), Santiago, Chile

    Anibal Pauchard

  15. Grupo de Biología de la Conservación, Laboratorio Ecotono, INIBIOMA (CONICET-UNCOMA), Bariloche, Argentina

    Karina L. Speziale

  16. Department of Ecology and Evolution, University of Lausanne, 1015, Lausanne, Switzerland

    Jake M. Alexander

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  1. Keith L. McDougall
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  2. Jonas Lembrechts
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  3. Lisa J. Rew
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  8. Bridgett J. Naylor
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  9. Martin A. Nuñez
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  12. Karina L. Speziale
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  13. Genevieve T. Wright
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  14. Jake M. Alexander
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Correspondence to Keith L. McDougall.

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McDougall, K.L., Lembrechts, J., Rew, L.J. et al. Running off the road: roadside non-native plants invading mountain vegetation. Biol Invasions 20, 3461–3473 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10530-018-1787-z

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