Wednesday, April 13, 2011

Effects of Invasive Species on Biodiversity is scale-dependent

According to a recent meta-analysis published in American Journal of Botany.

"While invasive plant species at small spatial scales (plots < 100 m2) severely decreased native species richness, the impact of the invasive species decreased as the size of the study plot increased (details)"

1 comment:

fnkykntr said...

Hmmm... I will need to read the paper but it strike me that studying spatial scale without a consideration of the limits of the habitat that will be affected by the invasive is a bit pointless - i.e. if an invasive only affects waterways then it will have a massive local impact but of course not at the scale of an island as impacts are highly localised. I wonder if they controlled for how specialised the invasive is to a particular habitat or considered the implications?