Invasive plants' fungal partnerships shift by habitat and disturbance type
Cazzaniga SG, Lauber T, van den Hoogen J, Beaury EM, Bueno CG
Mycorrhizal Networks
The weeds popping up after construction near your home versus the ones invading a grassland got there through completely different fungal strategies, so a one-size-fits-all approach to stopping them won't work.
Most plants team up with underground fungi called mycorrhizae, which help them pull water and nutrients from soil. Scientists looked at plant surveys from all over the world and found that invasive plants in grasslands and deserts often skip the fungal partnership entirely, while invaders in forests and other biomes lean on it heavily. Surprisingly, invasive plants that can go either way, with or without fungi, are actually rarer than expected, suggesting that being adaptable isn't the secret weapon researchers thought it was.
Key Findings
Analysis of 440,788 global vegetation plots showed non-native plants are more often non-mycorrhizal than natives in grassland and desert biomes, but more often mycorrhizal (mostly arbuscular-mycorrhizal) in other biomes.
Landscape modification (like development) favors mycorrhizal non-native species, while natural and human-caused disturbance events favor non-mycorrhizal non-native species.
Facultatively mycorrhizal species (those that can flexibly form or skip fungal partnerships) are consistently under-represented among non-natives, contradicting the assumption that symbiotic flexibility aids invasion.
chevron_right Technical Summary
A massive global study of nearly half a million vegetation surveys found that whether invasive plants team up with soil fungi depends heavily on where they are and how disturbed the land is, not on being flexible generalists as scientists once assumed.
Abstract Preview
Original paper
Mycorrhizal strategy of non-native plants varies with biome and disturbance.
Predicting which non-native plant species will become established and where is critical for conserving and managing biodiversity. Theory suggests that the mycorrhizal strategy of non-native plants ...
open_in_new Read full abstractAbstract copyright held by the original publisher.
Was this useful?
Want to tell us more? (optional)
Thanks for the note!
Something went wrong — please try again.
Too many submissions. Try again in an hour.
Street trees cut heat deaths by 39 percent in European cities
Trees in your local park or street aren't just pretty — they are literally keeping people alive during heatwaves, and planting even a modest number of the ri...
An invasive species is an introduced organism that harms its new environment by outcompeting native flora and disrupting ecosystem balance. For plant scientists, invasive plant species represent a critical research frontier because they fundamentally alter biodiversity, compromise agricultural
arrow_forward Explore topic