Running title: invasions in heterogeneous lake landscapes
Jorge
Salgado1,2,3,4,(Jorge.SalgadoBonnet@nottingham.ac.uk),
Carl D. Sayer2 (c.sayer@ucl.ac.uk), Nigel
Willby8(n.j.willby@stir.ac.uk), Ben
Goldsmith2 (b.goldsmith@ucl.ac.uk), Thomas A.
Davidson5 (thd@bios.au.dk), Suzanne
McGowan3 (Suzanne.Mcgowan@nottingham.ac.uk), Ambroise
G. Baker2, 6, 7(a.baker@tees.ac.uk), Patrik
Bexell2 (potrik.potrik@googlemail.com), Ian R.
Patmore2 (i.patmore@ucl.ac.uk), Beth
Okamura1(b.okamura@nhm.ac.uk).
1 Department of Life Sciences, Natural History Museum,
London, UK
2 Environmental Change Research Centre, Department of
Geography, University College London, London, UK
3 School of Geography, University of Nottingham,
Nottingham, UK
4 Facultad de Ingeniería, Universidad Católica de
Colombia, Bogotá, Colombia
5 Lake Group and Arctic Research Centre, Department of
Bioscience, Silkeborg, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark
6 School of Health and Life Science, Teesside
University, Middlesbrough, UK
7 National Horizons Centre, Teesside University,
Darlington, UK.
8 Biological and Environmental Sciences, University of
Stirling, Stirling, UK
Key words : beta diversity, boosted regression trees,
connectivity, Elodea canadensis , invasive species,
metacommunities, plant cover, shallow lakes, species richness, species
abundance
Type of article : Letters
Number of words in Abstract (150), Number of words in text (4994),
number of references (58); number of figures (6)
Corresponding author : Jorge Salgado
(Jorge.SalgadoBonnet@nottingham.ac.uk)
Statement of authorship : JS conceived the ideas; JS, BG, TD,
CS, IP, PB, and BO collected the contemporary and palaeo‐ data; JS
analysed the data and wrote the first manuscript; BO, CS, AB, NW, TD, SM
contributed essentially to the interpretation and wording of the final
version.
Data accessibility statement : should the manuscript be
accepted, the data supporting the results will be archived in an
appropriate public repository (Dryad, Figshare or Hal) and the data DOI
will be included at the end of the article.
Abstract
Successful plant invasions are hypothesised to be associated with close
environmental matching or species poor communities. However, positive
correlations between non-native abundance and native plant richness can
also arise due to habitat heterogeneity (defined here as variation in
abiotic and biotic conditions over space and time). We analysed survey
and palaeoecological data for macrophytes in lakes covering a gradient
of eutrophication and connectivity to partition the roles of
environmental matching, macrophyte diversity and habitat heterogeneity
in explaining abundance and invasibility of Elodea canadensis , a
widely distributed non-native macrophyte in Europe. There was no
association between invasibility and macrophyte species richness.
Instead habitat heterogeneity variously enabled the coexistence of
native macrophytes and E. canadensis in lake metacommunities over
time. Invasion resistance was associated with high native macrophyte
cover and unfavourable environmental conditions. We show how spatial and
temporal scales can determine the relationship between habitat
heterogeneity and invasibility in lake systems.