Centre for Conservation Ecology and Genomics, Institute for Applied Ecology, University of Canberra, Bruce, ACT, Australia.
Ecol Lett. 2021 Jul;24(7):1363-1374. doi: 10.1111/ele.13751. Epub 2021 Apr 25.
Ecological processes often exhibit time lags. For plant invasions, lags of decades to centuries between species' introduction and establishment in the wild (naturalisation) are common, leading to the idea of an invasion debt: accelerating rates of introduction result in an expanding pool of introduced species that will naturalise in the future. Here, I show how a concept from survival analysis, the hazard function, provides an intuitive way to understand and forecast time lags. For plant naturalisation, theoretical arguments predict that lags between introduction and naturalisation will have a unimodal distribution, and that increasing horticultural activity will cause the mean and variance of lag times to decline over time. These predictions were supported by data on introduction and naturalisation dates for plant species introduced to Britain. While increasing trade and horticultural activity can generate an invasion debt by accelerating introductions, the same processes could lower that debt by reducing lag times.
生态过程通常会出现时间滞后。对于植物入侵，物种从引入到在野外（自然归化）建立之间往往存在几十年到几个世纪的滞后，这导致了入侵债务的概念：引入速度的加快导致未来将自然归化的引入物种数量增加。在这里，我展示了生存分析中的一个概念，即危险函数，如何为理解和预测时间滞后提供一种直观的方法。对于植物的自然归化，理论论点预测引入和自然归化之间的滞后将呈现单峰分布，并且园艺活动的增加将导致滞后时间的均值和方差随时间减少。这些预测得到了英国引入植物物种的引入和自然归化日期数据的支持。虽然增加贸易和园艺活动可以通过加速引入来产生入侵债务，但同样的过程也可以通过减少滞后时间来降低债务。
