Parution d'une méta-analyse de l'impact écologique des PEE sur les communautés animales
"Jacob Barney, associate professor in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences' School of Plant and Environmental Sciences, graduate researcher Becky Fletcher, and a team of five other doctoral students conducted the first-ever comprehensive meta-analytic review examining the ecological impacts of invasive plants by exploring how animals -- indigenous and exotic -- respond to these nonnative plants. Their study, which took place over a two-year period, is published in the journal Global Change Biology. "Individual studies are system-specific, but we wanted to look for commonalities about how animals respond to invasive species. Our findings suggest that the impacts of invasive plants are much worse than we thought," said Barney. "Exotic animals' ability to survive on invasive plants coupled with the reduction of native animals is almost a worst-case scenario."
The team's findings underscore the negative impact of invasive plant species on native animal populations -- populations that include worms, birds, and a host of mammals and other vertebrates -- all of whom serve a multitude of important ecosystem functions across a range of trophic levels. Only mollusks and arthropods were unaffected.
"We had reason to believe that native and exotic animals may respond differently to invasive plants," said Fletcher, a Kansas City native who is completing her doctorate in invasive plant ecology, and the paper's lead author. "We hypothesized that exotic plants may increase the abundance of exotic animals while reducing the abundance of native animals."
As it turns out, invasive plants had no impact on the abundance of exotic animals. The plants do not facilitate exotic animals, nor do they harm them. In essence, nonnative flora provides sufficient nourishment and other benefits to uphold, if not to enlarge, nonnative animal populations. On the other hand, native animals are diminishing as invasive plants gain a foothold in their habitats."
Article complet disponible ici : https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/gcb.14752
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