The National Field Station of Liangzi Lake Ecosystem, Department of Ecology, College of Life Sciences, Wuhan University, Wuhan, 430072, China.
Sci Rep. 2016 Nov 29;6:38036. doi: 10.1038/srep38036.
Environmental heterogeneity is considered to play a defining role in promoting invasion success, and it favours clonal plants. Although clonality has been demonstrated to be correlated with the invasion success of several species of clonal invasive plants in heterogeneous environments, little is known about how the spatial scale of heterogeneity affects their performance. In addition, the factors that distinguish invasive from non-invasive clonal species and that enhance the invasive potential of clonal exotic invaders in heterogeneous environments remain unclear. In this study, we compared several traits of a noxious clonal invasive species, Alternanthera philoxeroides, with its co-occurring non-invasive functional counterparts, the native congener Alternanthera sessilis, the exotic Myriophyllum aquaticum and the native Jussiaea repens, in three manipulative substrates with different soil distribution patterns. We found that the invasive performance of A. philoxeroides was not enhanced by heterogeneity and that it was generally scale independent. However, A. philoxeroides showed some advantages over the three non-invasives with respect to trait values and phenotypic variation. These advantages may enhance the competitive capacity of A. philoxeroides and thus promote its invasion success in heterogeneous environments.
环境异质性被认为在促进入侵成功方面起着决定性作用，并且有利于克隆植物。尽管已经证明克隆性与异质环境中几种克隆入侵植物的入侵成功有关，但对于异质环境如何影响它们的表现，我们知之甚少。此外，区分入侵和非入侵克隆物种的因素以及增强异质环境中克隆外来入侵物种的入侵潜力的因素仍不清楚。在这项研究中，我们比较了一种有害的克隆入侵物种空心莲子草及其共存的非入侵功能对应物，本地同属植物节节菜、外来植物水蕹菜和本地水竹叶，在三种具有不同土壤分布模式的人工基质中，我们发现空心莲子草的入侵性能并没有因异质性而增强，而且通常与尺度无关。然而，空心莲子草在某些性状值和表型变异方面相对于三种非入侵种具有一定的优势。这些优势可能增强了空心莲子草的竞争能力，从而促进了它在异质环境中的入侵成功。
