The rarest invaders: systematic global evidence for the conservation-invasion paradox in plants.
Ripa RR, Klinger YP, Franzese J
Invasive Species
A plant you might find listed as endangered in a botanical garden catalog could be the same species choking out natives in a wetland restoration site two countries away — and right now, conservation law and invasive species law have no coordinated way to handle it.
Some plants are disappearing from the places they originally evolved, yet thriving in new places where humans have accidentally or intentionally brought them. Researchers combed through global databases and found 89 plants living this double life — rare at home, invasive abroad. The twist is that the same human pressures destroying them in one place (farming, overuse, land development) often drive the global trade that spreads them somewhere new.
Key Findings
89 vascular plant species simultaneously qualify as conservation-threatened in their native range and invasive in at least one other region worldwide.
Threatened plants are approximately 10 times less likely to naturalize and 17 times less likely to become invasive than non-threatened species, making these 89 cases genuinely paradoxical outliers.
CIP plants cluster in the Americas and East-Southeast Asia and are strongly linked to human use — agriculture, overexploitation, and development are the dominant drivers of both their native decline and their spread abroad.
chevron_right Technical Summary
Some of the world's rarest plants — threatened in their native homelands — have become invasive elsewhere, creating a striking paradox: the same human activities driving a plant toward extinction at home (farming, trade, development) are also spreading it into new regions where it thrives unchecked. Researchers identified 89 such plant species globally, concentrated in the Americas and East-Southeast Asia.
Abstract Preview
The Conservation-Invasion Paradox (CIP) refers to species that are threatened or declining within their native ranges establish invasive populations elsewhere. While this paradox has been documente...
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