Human activities like urbanization and agriculture affect spatial biodiversity patterns. The presence and activities of humans richly benefit alien species, but native species usually decline in human-impacted areas. Considering that the richness of alien and native species are inter-related, we explored the effect of human population density, human-related land uses (agricultural and urban), and natural land area on avian (alien and native) species richness of Massachusetts for two time periods using Generalized Additive Models. Avian alien species richness increased with native species richness in both time periods. Despite the predominant role of native species richness as a major driver of alien species richness, human activities play an important additional role in shaping species richness patterns of established aliens. Human-related land uses (urban and agricultural) and human population favored alien species richness in both time periods. Counter to expectations, human activities were also positively associated to native avian species richness. Possible explanations of these patterns may include habitat heterogeneity, increased availability of resources, and reduced predation risk.
Understanding the ecological mechanisms behind biological invasions remains a major focus of conservation biology and ecosystem management. Several hypotheses highlight that different facets of native biodiversity affect the establishment and spread of alien species. Here, we approach this question by examining the spatiotemporal relationship between alien bird species richness and different facets of biodiversity (taxonomic, functional, and phylogenetic) using breeding bird atlases for three U.S. states and for two time periods in each state. We associated native species richness, and functional and phylogenetic diversity with alien species richness, using generalized least squares models. Our results show that, consistently, across the three states and two time periods examined, alien species richness is positively associated with native diversity, and particularly with phylogenetic diversity. The relative importance of biodiversity metrics reflecting the functional or phylogenetic range occupied by the assemblage seems to advocate in favor of the importance of resource diversity as a main driver of both native and alien diversity. The secondary importance of biodiversity facets reflecting species functional or phylogenetic similarity, along with the lack of importance of functional or phylogenetic clustering or overdispersion, implies that if this relationship is shaped by biotic interactions, then biotic interactions facilitating coexistence (including even processes like predator‐mediated coexistence) are far more important than adversarial interactions like competition, at least at the scale of our analysis. Finally, the dominance of phylogenetic metrics over functional ones highlights the adaptive potential of a community accumulated over long lineage history may play an additional role as a source of information on evolutionary processes driving diversity patterns.
The challenge of predicting the distribution of alien species has long been a focus of invasion ecology. Herein, we assessed biotic and abiotic factors from the 1980s as potential predictors of alien bird species patterns 20 years later in the state of New York. To assess the ability of each factor to predict future alien species patterns, we analysed the influence of biotic (native taxonomic, functional and phylogenetic diversity, and human population density) and abiotic (climate and land use) factors from the 1980s on the observed alien species richness patterns in the 2000s and the temporal change in the composition of the alien communities between the 1980s and the 2000s using both single-predictor and multivariate models. Alien species richness from the 1980s was a reliable predictor of the alien species richness and temporal beta-diversity patterns in the 2000s. Among abiotic factors, maximum temperature and agricultural land-uses constituted sufficient predictors of future alien species richness and better predictors than the native biotic factors. The performance of single-predictor models was generally weaker in predicting temporal alien beta-diversity; however, past alien species richness and maximum temperature again outperformed the other factors. Predictions and management decisions should focus on warm and agricultural areas, as well as areas with an already high number of established alien species.
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