Delgado Diana L, Figueroa Josimar, Restrepo Carla
Department of Biology University of Puerto Rico-Río Piedras San Juan Puerto Rico.
Ecol Evol. 2016 Nov 21;6(24):8832-8845. doi: 10.1002/ece3.2588. eCollection 2016 Dec.
Predicting the invasive potential of introduced species remains an ongoing challenge due to the multiple interacting regional and global processes that facilitate the introduction and proliferation of alien species. This may be particularly true in regions where native species are increasingly reported as expanding and impacting ecosystems in ways indistinguishable from alien ones. Current approaches to assess the invasive potential of plants may be limited by the choice of traits used and the exclusion of native species. To overcome these limitations, we develop a novel approach that focuses on all species-native and alien-within a functional group of plants to predict their proliferation status. Our approach relied on the development of an extensive database of extrinsic and intrinsic traits for Puerto Rican vines with the goal of generating a predictive model of vine proliferation status. We test three hypotheses linking origin, extrinsic and intrinsic traits, and proliferation status. We found that the origin of proliferating vines was associated with only one out of seven traits, namely plant use. We also found that proliferation status was associated with all but two traits, namely life span and climbing mechanism. Finally, a classification tree analysis identified five variables as good predictors of proliferation status and used them to split the species into six groups characterized by a unique suite of traits, three of them included proliferating species. The development of tools to identify potential proliferating species is critical for management and conservation purposes. Tools that can minimize biases and make predictions based on trait data easily obtainable are particularly needed in regions with a high taxonomic and functional diversity, and with limited ecological knowledge of individual species. In addition, these tools should be capable of incorporating native species since an increasing number of native species are behaving like invasive aliens.
由于多种区域和全球进程相互作用，促进了外来物种的引入和扩散，预测外来物种的入侵潜力仍然是一项持续存在的挑战。在一些地区，本地物种越来越多地被报道其扩张并以与外来物种难以区分的方式影响生态系统，情况可能尤其如此。目前评估植物入侵潜力的方法可能受到所使用特征的选择以及本地物种被排除的限制。为了克服这些限制，我们开发了一种新颖的方法，该方法关注植物功能组内的所有物种（本地物种和外来物种），以预测它们的扩散状态。我们的方法依赖于为波多黎各藤本植物建立一个广泛的外在和内在特征数据库，目的是生成藤本植物扩散状态的预测模型。我们检验了三个将起源、外在和内在特征与扩散状态联系起来的假设。我们发现，扩散藤本植物的起源仅与七个特征中的一个相关，即植物用途。我们还发现，扩散状态与除两个特征（即寿命和攀爬机制）之外的所有特征相关。最后，分类树分析确定了五个变量作为扩散状态的良好预测指标，并使用它们将物种分为六组，每组具有独特的特征组合，其中三组包括扩散物种。开发识别潜在扩散物种的工具对于管理和保护目的至关重要。在分类和功能多样性高且对单个物种生态知识有限的地区，尤其需要能够最小化偏差并基于易于获取的特征数据进行预测的工具。此外，这些工具应该能够纳入本地物种，因为越来越多的本地物种表现得像入侵外来物种。
