Characterization of climate envelopes
We examined the range of conditions where G. platensis is found throughout South America (i.e., their “climate envelope”; Hijmans & Graham, 2006). These ranges were compared to the conditions where the species is found in Ecuador. This helped us define whether conditions in Ecuador differ from those in the rest of the continent. Climate envelopes were constructed using data from the top four environmental variables with highest contributions (i.e., > 10%) in the Maxent models and elevation. In order of importance, the variables included temperature seasonality (bio 4), annual mean temperature (bio 1), precipitation of the coldest quarter (bio 19), and mean temperature of the coldest month (bio 6). While elevation did not have a high contribution to the model, we used it here to broadly discuss areas of predicted suitable habitat of G. platensis . From these data, we determined the climate and elevation profiles for all localities whereG. platensis was documented by extracting environmental information across all localities and directly comparing the range of conditions individually in Ecuador vs. the rest of South America. These data were not normally distributed; thus, Wilcoxon rank sum tests followed by a Bonferroni correction for multiple comparisons were used to examine the differences between conditions in Ecuador vs. the rest of South America. This framework allowed us to better understand the variation in environmental niche occupancy in the introduced range ofG. platensis across the continent.