Université de Fribourg

Invasive alien plants benefit more from clonal integration in heterogeneous environments than natives

Wang, Yong-Jian ; Müller-Schärer, Heinz ; Kleunen, Mark van ; Cai, Ai-Ming ; Zhang, Ping ; Yan, Rong ; Dong, Bi-Cheng ; Yu, Fei-Hai

In: New Phytologist, 2017, vol. 216, no. 4, p. 1072–1078

What confers invasive alien plants a competitive advantage over native plants remains open to debate. Many of the world's worst invasive alien plants are clonal and able to share resources within clones (clonal integration), particularly in heterogeneous environments. Here, we tested the hypothesis that clonal integration benefits invasive clonal plants more than natives and thus confers...