Université de Fribourg

Do invasive alien plants differ from non-invasives in dominance and nitrogen uptake in response to variation of abiotic and biotic environments under global anthropogenic change?

Liu, Yuan-Yuan ; Sun, Yan ; Müller-Schärer, Heinz ; Yan, Rong ; Zhou, Zhi-Xiang ; Wang, Yong-Jian ; Yu, Fei-Hai

In: Science of The Total Environment, 2019, vol. 672, p. 634–642

Plant invasion is the outcome of complicated interactions of both biotic and abiotic environments (i.e. eutrophication and human-induced propagules) under global anthropogenic change. Here, we want to know why some alien clonal plant species become invasive and others do not in the introduced range with variations of both abiotic and biotic environments under global anthropogenic change.We...

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...