Climatic Niche Shifts Are Rare Among Terrestrial Plant Invaders

Abstract

Invading a Place Like Home Biological invasions can cause enormous economic problems but they also represent a biological experiment and provide insight into species distributions and range expansion or restriction. Most predictions about when and where species will invade rest on the assumption that invasive species will retain the same climatic niche in the invaded area. But is this assumption valid? Petitpierre et al. (p. 1344 ) studied a large data set on plant invasions between Eurasia, North America, and Australia and indeed found that fewer than 15% of the studied species occupied more than 10% of invaded distribution outside their native climatic niche, and only one species exhibited >50% climatic niche expansion in its invaded range. Thus, niche shifts are rather rare events in plant invasions.