Alien plant invasions in European woodlands

Viktoria Wagner*, Milan Chytrý, Borja Jiménez-Alfaro, Jan Pergl, Stephan Hennekens, Idoia Biurrun, Ilona Knollová, Christian Berg, Kiril Vassilev, John S. Rodwell, Željko Škvorc, Ute Jandt, Jörg Ewald, Florian Jansen, Ioannis Tsiripidis, Zoltán Botta-Dukát, Laura Casella, Fabio Attorre, Valerijus Rašomavičius, Renata ĆušterevskaJoop H.J. Schaminée, Jörg Brunet, Jonathan Lenoir, Jens Christian Svenning, Zygmunt Kącki, Mária Petrášová-Šibíková, Urban Šilc, Itziar García-Mijangos, Juan Antonio Campos, Federico Fernández-González, Thomas Wohlgemuth, Viktor Onyshchenko, Petr Pyšek

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalEditorialAcademicpeer-review

128 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Aim: Woodlands make up a third of European territory and carry out important ecosystem functions, yet a comprehensive overview of their invasion by alien plants has never been undertaken across this continent. Location: Europe. Methods: We extracted data from 251,740 vegetation plots stored in the recently compiled European Vegetation Archive. After filtering (resulting in 83,396 plots; 39 regions; 1970–2015 time period), we analysed the species pool and frequency of alien vascular plants with respect to geographic origin and life-forms, and the levels of invasion across the European Nature Information System (EUNIS) woodland habitats. Results: We found a total of 386 alien plant species (comprising 7% of all recorded vascular plants). Aliens originating from outside of and from within Europe were almost equally represented in the species pool (192 vs. 181 species) but relative frequency was skewed towards the former group (77% vs. 22%) due, to some extent, to the frequent occurrence of Impatiens parviflora (21% frequency among alien plants). Phanerophytes were the most species-rich life-form (148 species) and had the highest representation in terms of relative frequency (39%) among aliens in the dataset. Apart from Europe (181 species), North America was the most important source of alien plants (109 species). At the local scale, temperate and boreal softwood riparian woodland (5%) and mire and mountain coniferous woodland (<1%) had the highest and lowest mean relative alien species richness (percentage of alien species per plot), respectively. Main conclusions: Our results indicate that European woodlands are prone to alien plant invasions especially when exposed to disturbance, fragmentation, alien propagule pressure and high soil nutrient levels. Given the persistence of these factors in the landscape, competitive alien plant species with a broad niche, including alien trees and shrubs, are likely to persist and spread further into European woodlands.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)969-981
JournalDiversity and Distributions
Volume23
Issue number9
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2017

Keywords

  • EUNIS
  • exotic
  • forest
  • invasive plants
  • life-form
  • neophyte
  • non-native
  • origin
  • tree

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