PLANT INVASION ECOLOGY: Impacts & Sustainable Management (Environmental Research Advances)

Exotic invasive plant species pose a serious threat to native biodiversity. Invasive plants transmogrify the landscape ecology in a highly complex manner leading to a sort of ecological explosion. Global terrestrials as well as aquatic ecosystems are invaded by various invasive plant species. Invasive species are alien species whose introduction and spread threatens ecosystems, habitats or species with socio-cultural, economic and/or environmental harm, and also poses a risk to human health. The present book aims to provide a critical review on the mechanisms, impact and management of invasive species, particularly in the context of plants. Plant invasion is now increasingly being recognised as a global problem and various continents are adversely affected, although to a differential scale. Invasive plants not only alter plant ecosystem functions, but also result in large economic costs from lost ecosystem services. The quest for ecological mechanisms behind the success of invasive species over native species has drawn the attention of researchers world-wide, particularly in the context of the diversity-stability relationship. The transport, colonisation, establishment and landscape spread are different steps in the success of invasive plants, and each and every step is checked through several ecological attributes. Furthermore, several ecological attributes and hypotheses (enemy release, novel weapon, empty niche, evolution of increased competitive ability etc.) were proposed pertaining to the success of invasive plant species. However, a single theory will not be able to account for the invasion success among all environments, as it may vary spatially and temporally. Therefore, in order to formulate a sustainable management plan for invasive plants, it is necessary to develop a synoptic view of the dynamic processes involved in the invasion process. Moreover, invasive species can act synergistically with other elements of global change, including land-use change, climate change, increased concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide and nitrogen deposition. Henceforth, a unified framework for biological invasions that reconcile and integrate the key features of the most commonly used invasion frame-works into a single conceptual model that can be applied to all human-mediated invasions will be developed.