Where we've been and where we're going: the importance of source communities in predicting establishment success from phylogenetic relationships

Abstract

The last two decades have seen growing use of phylogenetic patterns to test hypotheses predicting the success of introduced species. Nearly all of these tests have focused on hypotheses pertaining to phylogenetic relatedness between introduced species and those of the recipient community, largely neglecting hypotheses regarding phylogenetic relationships in the source region. We synthesize hypotheses regarding how phylogenetic relationships of both recipient and source regions together influence establishment success. We also detail how best to account for differences in source communities within phylogenetic frameworks of invasion. Existing studies have predominantly focused on the environmental filtering and competition‐relatedness hypotheses, which deal with relatedness to the recipient community. We discuss how these recipient–region hypotheses can be integrated with three hypotheses focused on the relatedness between an introduced species and the source community in which it originated: the evolutionary imbalance, universal tradeoff and competitive constraint hypotheses. We detail important issues that arise when testing alternative hypotheses and interpreting results. We highlight a lack of tests of synthetic phylogenetic hypotheses including both the source and recipient community phylogenetic structure, as well as important covariates such as propagule pressure. Such synthetic tests may be valuable for identifying general phylogenetic patterns in establishment success, predicting future invasions, and for stimulating further exploration of the underlying mechanisms of invasibility. We conclude with recommendations for future studies that use phylogenetic relationships to predict invasions: including source and recipient communities, using complete phylogenies and accounting for phylogenetic uncertainty, considering multiple stages of invasion and conducting analyses across spatial and phylogenetic scales where possible.

A test of Darwin’s naturalization conundrum in birds reveals enhanced invasion success in the presence of close relatives

“…The spatial scale of the source community is a critical factor influencing phylogenetic tests of biological invasions (Maitner et al, 2021). To estimate phylogenetic distances between the set of non‐native and native species found at different scales, we followed Park et al (2020) and used the Community Distance (CD) and the maximized Community Distance Nearest Taxon (mCDNT).…”

High habitat invasibility unveils the invasiveness potential of water frogs

“…Finegrained, broad-scale phylogeographic studies, such as those using RADSeq approaches, will also help shed light on the origin of IAS (Dubey et al 2019). Together, these results will enhance our understanding of how the diversity of IAS and invaded landscapes can affect the invasibility of habitats (Maitner et al 2021) and ultimately depict the invasiveness potential of water frogs and other IAS.…”

Rapid monitoring of Ambrosia artemisiifolia in semi-arid regions based on ecological convergence and phylogenetic relationships

“…At fine spatial scales (in relation to plant size), one can expect closely related organisms to exist in mutually exclusive patterns due to competitive interactions. Species less closely related to the local community are more likely to coexist by minimizing competitive exclusion (Maitner et al, 2021). Li et al (2015) found that the probability of invader establishment declined with increasing PD between the invader and residents; whereas the average size of surviving invader individuals increased with PD.…”