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      Warming Increases the Spread of an Invasive Thistle

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      1 , * , 2 , 1
      PLoS ONE
      Public Library of Science

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          Abstract

          Background

          Global warming and shifted precipitation regimes increasingly affect species abundances and distributions worldwide. Despite a large literature on species' physiological, phenological, growth, and reproductive responses to such climate change, dispersal is rarely examined. Our study aims to test whether the dispersal ability of a non-native, wind-dispersed plant species is affected by climate change, and to quantify the ramifications for future invasion spread rates.

          Methodology/Principal Findings

          We experimentally increased temperature and precipitation in a two-cohort, factorial field study (n = 80). We found an overwhelming warming effect on plant life history: warming not only improved emergence, survival, and reproduction of the thistle Carduus nutans, but also elevated plant height, which increased seed dispersal distances. Using spatial population models, we demonstrate that these empirical warming effects on demographic vital rates, and dispersal parameters, greatly exacerbate spatial spread. Predicted levels of elevated winter precipitation decreased seed production per capitulum, but this only slightly offset the warming effect on spread. Using a spread rate decomposition technique ( c*-LTRE), we also found that plant height-mediated changes in dispersal contribute most to increased spread rate under climate change.

          Conclusions/Significance

          We found that both dispersal and spread of this wind-dispersed plant species were strongly impacted by climate change. Dispersal responses to climate change can improve, or diminish, a species' ability to track climate change spatially, and should not be overlooked. Methods that combine both demographic and dispersal responses thus will be an invaluable complement to projections of suitable habitat under climate change.

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              Five potential consequences of climate change for invasive species.

              Scientific and societal unknowns make it difficult to predict how global environmental changes such as climate change and biological invasions will affect ecological systems. In the long term, these changes may have interacting effects and compound the uncertainty associated with each individual driver. Nonetheless, invasive species are likely to respond in ways that should be qualitatively predictable, and some of these responses will be distinct from those of native counterparts. We used the stages of invasion known as the "invasion pathway" to identify 5 nonexclusive consequences of climate change for invasive species: (1) altered transport and introduction mechanisms, (2) establishment of new invasive species, (3) altered impact of existing invasive species, (4) altered distribution of existing invasive species, and (5) altered effectiveness of control strategies. We then used these consequences to identify testable hypotheses about the responses of invasive species to climate change and provide suggestions for invasive-species management plans. The 5 consequences also emphasize the need for enhanced environmental monitoring and expanded coordination among entities involved in invasive-species management.
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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                Role: Editor
                Journal
                PLoS One
                plos
                plosone
                PLoS ONE
                Public Library of Science (San Francisco, USA )
                1932-6203
                2011
                29 June 2011
                : 6
                : 6
                : e21725
                Affiliations
                [1 ]Department of Biology, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania, United States of America
                [2 ]Department of Experimental Plant Ecology, Institute for Water and Wetland Research, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen, The Netherlands
                University of Tartu, Estonia
                Author notes

                Conceived and designed the experiments: RZ KS. Performed the experiments: RZ. Analyzed the data: RZ EJ KS. Wrote the paper: RZ KS EJ.

                Article
                PONE-D-11-04900
                10.1371/journal.pone.0021725
                3126854
                21738779
                1d1b169d-1077-4a12-9352-4d4dc0f286ed
                Zhang et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
                History
                : 15 March 2011
                : 6 June 2011
                Page count
                Pages: 6
                Categories
                Research Article
                Biology
                Ecology
                Plant Ecology
                Plant-Environment Interactions
                Global Change Ecology
                Population Ecology
                Plant Science
                Earth Sciences
                Atmospheric Science
                Climatology
                Climate Change

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                Uncategorized

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