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Invasion ecology has made considerable progress in identifying specific mechanisms that potentially determine success and failure of biological invasions. Increasingly, efforts are being made to interrelate or even synthesize the growing number of hypotheses in order to gain a more comprehensive and integrative understanding of invasions. We argue that adopting an eco-evolutionary perspective on invasions is a promising approach to achieve such integration. It emphasizes the evolutionary antecedents of invasions, i.e. the species’ evolutionary legacy and its role in shaping novel biotic interactions that arise due to invasions. We present a conceptual framework consisting of five hypothetical scenarios about the influence of so-called ‘eco-evolutionary experience’ in resident native and invading non-native species on invasion success, depending on the type of ecological interaction (predation, competition, mutualism, and commensalism). We show that several major ecological invasion hypotheses, including ‘enemy release’, ‘EICA’, ‘novel weapons’, ‘naive prey’, ‘new associations’, ‘missed mutualisms’ and ‘Darwin’s naturalization hypothesis’ can be integrated into this framework by uncovering their shared implicit reference to the concept of eco-evolutionary experience. We draft a routine for the assessment of eco-evolutionary experience in native and non-native species using a food web-based example and propose two indices (xpFocal index and xpResidents index) for the actual quantification of eco-evolutionary experience. Our study emphasizes the explanatory potential of an eco-evolutionary perspective on biological invasions.
Several major hypotheses have been proposed to explain and predict biological invasions, but the general applicability of these hypotheses is largely unknown, as most of them have not been evaluated using a standard approach across taxonomic groups and habitats. We offer such an evaluation for six selected leading hypotheses. Our global literature review reveals that those hypotheses that consider interactions of exotic invaders with their new environment (invasional meltdown, novel weapons, enemy release) are better supported by empirical evidence than other hypotheses (biotic resistance, island susceptibility, tens rule). We also show that empirical support for the six hypotheses has declined over time, and that support differs among taxonomic groups and habitats. Our results have implications for basic and applied research, policy making, and invasive species management, as their effectiveness depends on sound hypotheses.