Shifting Global Invasive Potential of European Plants with Climate Change

Abstract

Global climate change and invasions by nonnative species rank among the top concerns for agents of biological loss in coming decades. Although each of these themes has seen considerable attention in the modeling and forecasting communities, their joint effects remain little explored and poorly understood. We developed ecological niche models for 1804 species from the European flora, which we projected globally to identify areas of potential distribution, both at present and across 4 scenarios of future (2055) climates. As expected from previous studies, projections based on the CGCM1 climate model were more extreme than those based on the HadCM3 model, and projections based on the a2 emissions scenario were more extreme than those based on the b2 emissions scenario. However, less expected were the highly nonlinear and contrasting projected changes in distributional areas among continents: increases in distributional potential in Europe often corresponded with decreases on other continents, and species seeing expanding potential on one continent often saw contracting potential on others. In conclusion, global climate change will have complex effects on invasive potential of plant species. The shifts and changes identified in this study suggest strongly that biological communities will see dramatic reorganizations in coming decades owing to shifting invasive potential by nonnative species.

Uses and misuses of bioclimatic envelope modeling

“…For such uses, errors of commission from the models are not necessarily errors; typically, they are the prediction of interest (i.e., model right, data wrong; see Table 2). Little guidance is available for choosing the right balance between minimization of omission and commission errors in such cases; a practical option is to choose the highest suitability score that achieves a certain minimum omission error (Peterson et al 2008b) as a threshold. Models need not even be comprehensive in scope (de Siqueira et al 2009); rather, the aim is to identify a few high-priority sites.…”

“…Although correlational in nature, these models offer an important capacity for studies in ecology and biogeography. Once envelopes are estimated, they can be applied to a variety of interesting questions, including discovery of new populations (e.g., Feria andPeterson 2002, Bourg et al 2005), discovery of previously unknown species (e.g., Raxworthy et al 2003), conservation planning (e.g., Williams et al 2005, Wilson et al 2005a, Arau´jo et al 2011a, assessment of potential geographic ranges of invasive species (e.g., Broennimann et al 2007, Peterson et al 2008b, Villemant et al 2011, mapping risk of disease transmission (e.g., Peterson et al 2006Peterson et al , 2007, forecasting effects of climate change on species' distributions (e.g., Thuiller et al 2005, Lawler et al 2009) and on phylogenetic diversity , and identifying historical refugia for biodiversity (e.g., Waltari et al 2007, Carnaval and Moritz 2008, Vega et al 2010. Numerous recent reviews have been published on different aspects of this field (e.g., Guisan and Thuiller 2005, Arau´jo and Guisan 2006, Heikkinen et al 2006, Latimer et al 2006, Arau´jo and New 2007, Austin 2007, Jime´nez-Valverde et al 2008, Nogue´s-Bravo 2009, Huntley et al 2010, Miller 2010, Pereira et al 2010) and the topic has seen discussion in ''perspectives'' articles Rahbek 2006, Thuiller 2007), edited books (Scott et al 2002), and textbooks (Franklin 2009.…”

Assessment of climatically suitable area for Syrmaticus reevesii under climate change

“…Species' responses to global climate change have been one of the most investigated issues in the field of ecology in recent years (Walther et al 2002, Thomas et al 2004, Peterson et al 2008b. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the global climate is getting warmer, and extreme weather events (droughts, floods, storms, and heat waves) are becoming more frequent (Solomon et al 2007).…”

An early suitability assessment of two exotic Ophraella species (Coleoptera: Chrysomelidae) for biological control of invasive ragweed in Europe

“…We used a climatic suitability modelling approach to make predictions about the climatic suitability of the target area for ragweed and both candidate species of Ophraella (van Klinken & Raghu, 2006), based on the similarity between the climate in the target area and the climate of present worldwide occurrences of these species (Elith et al, 2006). This method is often used to assess the potential geographic ranges of introduced alien species (Broennimann & Guisan, 2008;Peterson et al, 2008;Villemant et al, 2011) since occurrence data can usually be retrieved from the literature and climatic data are available online.…”