In: BioScience, 2018, vol. 68, no. 7, p. 496–509
Human activities such as the transport of species to new regions and modifications of the environment are increasingly reshaping the distribution of biota. Accordingly, developing robust, repeatable, and consistent definitions of alien species that serve scientific and policy purposes has become of prime importance. We provide a set of classification criteria that are widely applicable across...
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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...
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In: PLoS ONE, 2015, vol. 10, no. 4, p. e0122395
Climate change is altering spring snowmelt patterns in alpine and arctic ecosystems, and these changes may alter plant phenology, growth and reproduction. To predict how alpine plants respond to shifts in snowmelt timing, we need to understand trait plasticity, its effects on growth and reproduction, and the degree to which plants experience a home-site advantage. We tested how the common,...
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In: Heredity, 2014, p. -
Current threats to biodiversity, such as climate change, are thought to alter the within-species genetic diversity among microhabitats in highly heterogeneous alpine environments. Assessing the spatial organization and dynamics of genetic diversity within species can help to predict the responses of organisms to environmental change. In this study, we evaluated whether small-scale heterogeneity...
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In: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2013, vol. 110, no. 31, p. 12727–12732
Determinants of plant establishment and invasion are a key issue in ecology and evolution. Although establishment success varies substantially among species, the importance of species traits and extrinsic factors as determinants of establishment in existing communities has remained difficult to prove in observational studies because they can be confounded and mask each other. Therefore, we...
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In: PLoS ONE, 2012, vol. 7, no. 11, p. e50284
Phenotypic plasticity may allow organisms to cope with altered environmental conditions as e.g. after the introduction into a new range. In particular polyploid organisms, containing more than two sets of chromosomes, may show high levels of plasticity, which could in turn increase their environmental tolerance and invasiveness. Here, we studied the role of phenotypic plasticity in the invasion...
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In: New Phytologist, 2012, vol. 194, no. 3, p. 859–867
A high ability of alien plant species to capitalize on increases in resource availability has been suggested as an explanation for being globally successful. Here, we tested this hypothesis meta-analytically using existing data from experiments manipulating plant resources (light, water and nutrients).From these studies we extracted the response to resource increase of biomass, as an indicator of...
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