| Abstract Detail
The Botany of Invasions Kuebbing, Sara [1], Reeb, Rachel [2], Schricker, Lauren [2]. The timing of invasions: learning about invasive plant phenology through botanical records, contemporary observations, and empirical study. Botanist have long sought to identify the key plant traits that may make a nonnative species more likely to invade an ecosystem or more likely to have a large impact on native communities. As climates warm, botanists are observing that nonnative, invasive plants can have remarkably different phenological traits—or the timing of common life cycle events including leafing out each spring, fruiting and flowering—from native plants in the ecosystems they invade. Nonnatives may inhabit unique phenological niches, exhibit temporal priority effects by germinating or leafing out earlier than natives, or have greater phenological sensitivity to changing climates. Here, we demonstrate how we can use unique and informative datasets—ranging from herbarium records, community science observations, and manipulative experiments—to study the phenology of invasions. We discuss the limitations of each dataset and demonstrate that these datasets each can provide unique lenses across time and space to understand population-level differences of plant phenology in their invaded and native range, throughout their invasion history, and in response to changing climates. We focus on common invasive plants found in old-field and forested ecosystems in eastern North America. Specifically, we ask whether native and nonnative, invasive plants 1) inhabit unique phenological niches in these ecosystems and 2) differ in their sensitivity to changing climate conditions across space and time? We discuss the implications of these findings for predicting the impact of invasive plants on native plant communities and ecosystem processes in a warming climate, suggest key areas for future research.
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1 - University Of Pittsburgh, Biological Sciences, 4249 Fifth Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA, 15206, United States
2 - University of Pittsburgh, Biological Sciences
Keywords:
phenology
temperate forests
old-fields
invasive plants.
Presentation Type: Symposium Presentation
Session: SY2, The Botany of Invasions
Location: /
Date: Monday, July 19th, 2021
Time: 10:15 AM(EDT)
Number: SY2002
Abstract ID:148
Candidate for Awards:None |
