Effects of terrestrial transport corridors and associated landscape context on invasion by forest plants
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ORIGINAL PAPER
Effects of terrestrial transport corridors and associated landscape context on invasion by forest plants Samuel F. Ward . Benjamin S. Taylor . Kelly-Ann Dixon Hamil . Kurt H. Riitters . Songlin Fei
Received: 8 August 2019 / Accepted: 29 June 2020 Ó Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Abstract The construction, use, and maintenance of terrestrial transport corridors [roads and railroads (TTCs)] facilitate the spread of invasive plants, but the distances at which plants typically spread away from TTCs, and how that process is mediated by landscape context, is not well understood. We compiled data on the number of invasive plant species per * 672 m2 plot (= invasive richness) from 44,000 ? forest inventory plots in the eastern USA. Using a generalized linear model framework, we investigated how invasive richness is influenced by distance from the nearest TTC, surrounding land use type, and ecological province. Invasive richness in forests decreased as distance from the nearest TTC increased. Directly adjacent to TTCs, there were an
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s10530-020-02308-3) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. S. F. Ward B. S. Taylor S. Fei (&) Department of Forestry and Natural Resources, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN 47907, USA e-mail: [email protected] K.-A. Dixon Hamil Department of Economics, University of the West Indies, Mona Campus, Kingston 7, Jamaica K. H. Riitters USDA Forest Service, Southern Research Station, Research Triangle Park, NC 27709, USA
estimated 1.4 ± 0.01 SE invasive plant species per plot compared to 0.8 ± 0.01 and 0.2 ± 0.01 species at 1 and 3 km, respectively, away from the nearest TTC. Invasive richness was highest on plots associated with a combination of agriculture/development (2.1 ± 0.03 species per plot) and in the Midwest Broadleaf Forest province (2.1 ± 0.06). Our macroscale analysis also demonstrated that rates of decay in invasive richness away from TTCs were mediated by the types of land use and ecological provinces within which plots were located. The influences of TTCs and associated activities (e.g., construction, travel) on invasive plant richness were widespread across forests of the eastern USA, but the relative importance of TTCs for facilitating spread appears to be highly context dependent. Keywords Ecological province Forest Invasive plants Land use Macroscale Road ecology
Introduction Forests provide a multitude of ecosystem services, sequestering carbon (Bonan 2008), improving water quality (Fiquepron et al. 2013), and regulating local and regional climates (Bonan 2008). Invasive plants pose significant threats to forest ecosystem functioning (Martin et al. 2009; Pejchar and Mooney 2009; Fei
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et al. 2014) by driving changes in native plant community composition (Hejda et al. 2009), nutrient cycling (Ehrenfeld 2003; Vila` et al. 2011), hydrology (Ehrenf
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