Journal ArticleDOI
Invasional 'meltdown' on an oceanic island
TLDR
In this paper, the authors show invasion by the alien crazy ant Anoplolepis gracilipes causes a rapid, catastrophic shift in the rain forest ecosystem of a tropical oceanic island, affecting at least three trophic levels.Abstract:
Islands can serve as model systems for understanding how biological invasions affect community structure and ecosystem function. Here we show invasion by the alien crazy ant Anoplolepis gracilipes causes a rapid, catastrophic shift in the rain forest ecosystem of a tropical oceanic island, affecting at least three trophic levels. In invaded areas, crazy ants extirpate the red land crab, the dominant endemic consumer on the forest floor. In doing so, crazy ants indirectly release seedling recruitment, enhance species richness of seedlings, and slow litter breakdown. In the forest canopy, new associations between this invasive ant and honeydew-secreting scale insects accelerate and diversify impacts. Sustained high densities of foraging ants on canopy trees result in high population densities of hostgeneralist scale insects and growth of sooty moulds, leading to canopy dieback and even deaths of canopy trees. The indirect fallout from the displacement of a native keystone species by an ant invader, itself abetted by introduced/cryptogenic mutualists, produces synergism in impacts to precipitate invasional meltdown in this system.read more
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Journal ArticleDOI
Regime Shifts, Resilience, and Biodiversity in Ecosystem Management
Carl Folke,S. R. Carpenter,Brian Walker,Marten Scheffer,Thomas Elmqvist,Lance Gunderson,C. S. Holling +6 more
TL;DR: Active adaptive management and governance of resilience will be required to sustain desired ecosystem states and transform degraded ecosystems.
Journal ArticleDOI
Ecosystem Consequences of Biological Invasions
TL;DR: In this article, a variety of interacting, mutually reinforcing mechanistic pathways, including species' resource acquisition traits; population densities; ability to engineer changes to physical environmental conditions; effects on disturbance, especially fire; regimes; the ability to structure habitat for other species; and their impact on food webs, are discussed.
Journal ArticleDOI
Biological invasions: recommendations for U.S. policy and management.
David M. Lodge,Susan L. Williams,Hugh J. MacIsaac,Keith R. Hayes,Brian Leung,Sarah H. Reichard,Richard N. Mack,Peter B. Moyle,Maggie Smith,David A. Andow,James T. Carlton,Anthony J. McMichael +11 more
TL;DR: The Ecological Society of America recommends that the federal government take the following six actions: use new information and practices to better manage commercial and other pathways to reduce the transport and release of potentially harmful species, and establish a National Center for Invasive Species Management.
Journal ArticleDOI
The Black Queen Hypothesis: Evolution of Dependencies through Adaptive Gene Loss
TL;DR: The Black Queen Hypothesis as mentioned in this paper predicts that the loss of a costly, leaky function is selectively favored at the individual level and will proceed until the production of public goods is just sufficient to support the equilibrium community; at that point, the benefit of any further loss would be offset by the cost.
Journal ArticleDOI
The invasion paradox: reconciling pattern and process in species invasions.
Jason D. Fridley,John J. Stachowicz,Shahid Naeem,Dov F. Sax,Eric W. Seabloom,Melinda D. Smith,Thomas J. Stohlgren,David Tilman,B. Von Holle +8 more
TL;DR: It is concluded that natively rich ecosystems are likely to be hotspots for exotic species, but that reduction of local species richness can further accelerate the invasion of these and other vulnerable habitats.
References
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Book
Using multivariate statistics
TL;DR: In this Section: 1. Multivariate Statistics: Why? and 2. A Guide to Statistical Techniques: Using the Book Research Questions and Associated Techniques.
Journal ArticleDOI
Catastrophic shifts in ecosystems.
TL;DR: Recent studies show that a loss of resilience usually paves the way for a switch to an alternative state, which suggests that strategies for sustainable management of such ecosystems should focus on maintaining resilience.
Journal Article
Biological invasions as global environmental change
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors identify what seems to be a necessary and necessary starting point for this debate: the clearest possible understanding of how science actually works, and they believe that without such an understanding, one can easily imagine formulating plausible-sounding ethical principles that would be unworkable or damaging to the scientific enterprise.