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A global synthesis of naturalized and invasive plants in aquatic habitats

par Kortz, Alessandra A.;Meerts, Pierre Jacques ; [et al.]
Référence NeoBiota, 102, page (473-494)
Publication Publié, 2025-11-01

Article révisé par les pairs

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Résumé :

Global databases have contributed to our understanding of alien, naturalised and invasive plant speciesdistributions. Still, the role of species invasions in habitats, specifically in aquatic habitats, remains underexploredat the global scale. Accordingly, a comprehensive global synthesis of the status of plant invasionsin aquatic habitats has been missing. Here, we focus on macroecological patterns of naturalised non-invasiveand invasive plants in aquatic habitats using the recently built SynHab database. Amongst all theplant records compiled in SynHab, 592 are assigned to aquatic habitats, of which 183 are unique planttaxa (further termed ‘species’) belonging to 49 families. Of the total number of records, 462 refer to taxawith naturalised non-invasive occurrences and 130 to invasive occurrences. The species pool analysedhere refers to 78 regions distributed across all botanical continents as defined by the World GeographicalScheme for Recording Plant Distributions. The number of naturalised non-invasive aquatic species issimilar across different continents and biomes, but Tropical Asia had more and the Mediterranean zonobiomehad fewer invasive species than expected. Tropical Asia, Temperate Asia and Africa have the highestproportions of naturalised species that have become invasive, while across continents, invasive proportionswere highest for tropical and subtropical zonobiomes. New Zealand, Italy and California containeddisproportionately more naturalised species than expected, given the area covered by aquatic habitat inthose regions, whereas South Sudan, Papua New Guinea and Kyrgyzstan had disproportionately fewerspecies. In pairwise dissimilarity comparisons, all continents had distinct species compositions (from0.73 to 0.92 of the Jaccard dissimilarity index) and so did zonobiomes (0.69 to 1.00). The high proportionof invasive species in Tropical Asia in comparison with terrestrial invasions in this region, indicatesa greater susceptibility of warmer regions to aquatic plant invasions. This may be exacerbated by furthernaturalisations in the future, as data from temperate regions suggest a larger pool of available species.