A conceptual figure from Buonaiuto et al., 2023 that detail how evolutionary history should inform the ability for risk assessments to identify potential invaders by including information about taxonomic relationship to known invaders.
A map of vegetative plots from the Standardized Plant Community with Introduced Status (Petri et al. 2023) database compiled by my collaborators in the Invasive Plant Impacts working group.
Invasive species research offers a unique opportunity to link fundamental ecological research to applications that can benefit land managers and other environmental stakeholders. For this reason, a number of my projects are informed by collaborations with managers and researchers through the my leadership role with the Northeast Regional Invasive Species and Climate Change Network (NE RISCC).
Within this focus, we recently published a study exploring how approaches from evolutionary biology can (and do) inform invasive plant risk assessments and are currently in the late stages of a meta-analysis evaluating how biocontrol agents and their invasive host may be affected by climate change.
Invasive plant impacts and management
Invasive species can represent a major threat to biodiversity, local economies and public health. However, the impacts of invasive species depend strongly on the identity of the invader, characteristics of the recipient community, and can vary in both time and space. A major focus of my current work is to quantify invasive plant impacts on the structure and function of native plant communities using compilations of botanical survey plots and comparing ecological characteristics between invaded and un-invaded communities. With collaborators from the USGS's John Wesley Powell Center for Analysis and Synthesis's Invasive Plant Impacts working group, I ask questions like:
How do invasive species alter the functional trait profiles of ecological communities?
Do invasive species increase or decrease the taxonomic, phylogenetic and functional similarity of neighboring ecological communities?
What are the ecological characteristics that make some native plant communities more resistant to invasion that others?