Plant Ecology, Biodiversity, Biological Invasions, macroecology and biogeography of plant invasions, species invasiveness, ecosystem invasibility, and the drivers and impacts of alien species naturalisation and spread.
Non-native and invasive trees, vegetation ecology, biodiversity impacts, and site-specific management of invasive plants.
Invasion and community ecology, biodiversity change, biotic homogenisation, and the impacts of non-native plants on ecological communities across spatial and temporal scales.
Invasion science, restoration ecology, hybridization in the Phragmites australis complex.
Applied and landscape ecology, botany. Particular emphasis on hybridisation processes.
Invasion ecology, focusing on large-scale patterns, trait-based mechanisms, and cross-regional comparisons of naturalized species.
Plant invasions result from the interaction between the ability of alien species to establish and spread, the susceptibility of recipient communities to invasion, and the environmental and human factors operating across landscapes. These components are often studied separately, although together they determine the observed level and dynamics of invasion.
This Working Group will connect these perspectives within a common framework and investigate the conditions under which alien plants expand their ranges and become invasive. It will integrate large-scale databases on plant distributions, community composition and environmental conditions with long-term vegetation survey data, allowing invasion processes to be examined from species and community levels to regional and continental scales.
The Working Group will address four complementary aspects of plant invasions. It will test whether longer residence time allows alien plants to occupy a broader range of habitats; whether established invasive plants influence subsequent invasions through their phylogenetic relatedness to later-arriving species; and how climate, soils and topography shape community susceptibility and the invasion of Robinia pseudoacacia. It will also assess how settlement intensity, transport connectivity, land use and landscape heterogeneity affect invasion dynamics across spatial scales. Particular attention will be paid to non-linear responses, scale dependence and thresholds beyond which human pressure may trigger rapid invasion or natural landscapes may lose their resistance.
The overall goal is to identify the key conditions under which different drivers gain or lose importance and to improve the prediction and management of biological invasions.
Project HIVE 101187384. Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Executive Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.
