cage matching head to head competition experiments of an invasive plant species from different regions as a means to test for differentiation笼匹配实验的竞赛来来自不同地区的入侵植物物种分化来试验.pdfVIP

Cage Matching: Head to Head Competition Experiments of an Invasive Plant Species from Different Regions as a Means to Test for Differentiation 1 2 3 4 Christopher J. Lortie *, Michael Munshaw , Andrea Zikovitz , Jose Hierro 1 Department of Biology, York University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, 2 Department of Biology, York University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, 3 Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, 4 Conicet, University of La Pampa, Santa Rosa, La Pampa, Argentina Abstract Many hypotheses are prevalent in the literature predicting why some plant species can become invasive. However, in some respects, we lack a standard approach to compare the breadth of various studies and differentiate between alternative explanations. Furthermore, most of these hypotheses rely on ‘changes in density’ of an introduced species to infer invasiveness. Here, we propose a simple method to screen invasive plant species for potential differences in density effects between novel regions. Studies of plant competition using density series are a fundamental tool applied to virtually every aspect of plant population ecology to better understand evolution. Hence, we use a simple density series with substitution contrasting the performance of Centaurea solstitialis in monoculture (from one region) to mixtures (seeds from two regions). All else being equal, if there is no difference between the introduced species in the two novel regions compared, Argentina and California, then there should be no competitive differences between intra and inter-regional competition series. Using a replicated regression design, seeds of each species were sown in the greenhouse at 5 densities in monoculture and mixed