An international team of scientists has recently found that non-native species are expanding their ranges many orders of magnitude faster than native ones, in large part due to inadvertent human help.
An international team of scientists has recently found that non-native species are expanding their ranges many orders of magnitude faster than native ones, in large part due to inadvertent human help. Even seemingly sedentary non-native plants are moving at three times the speed of their native counterparts in a race where, because of the rapid pace of climate change and its effect on habitat, speed matters. To survive, plants and animals need to be shifting their ranges by 3.25 kilometers per year just to keep up with the increasing temperatures and associated climactic shifts—a speed that native species cannot manage without human help. Led by scientists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, the team includes researchers from New Jersey, Michigan, Colorado and Hawaii in the U.S., as well as Sevilla and Zaragoza in Spain and was published in Annual Reviews of Ecology, Evolution and Systematics.
“We know that the numbers of invasive plant species are increasing exponentially worldwide,” says Bethany Bradley, professor of environmental conservation at UMass Amherst and the paper’s lead author. “We also know that plant nurseries are exacerbating the climate-driven spread of invasives and that confronting invasives is one of the best ways to prepare for climate change. What we wanted to find out is how fast both native and non-native species are moving right now, and how far could they go.”
To figure out how fast species are moving, Bradley and her colleagues comprehensively surveyed a vast trove of previously published papers and publicly available datasets on how far and how fast both native and non-native species, representing different taxa and various ecosystems, have been moving. An important subset of this search was to compile data showing how humans are helping to accelerate the spread of non-native species, either accidentally, such as when a particular species finds itself in a shipping container that travels between continents, or intentionally, when a gardener buys an invasive ornamental from a nursery and drives it back to their home.
Read more at: University of Massachusetts - Amherst
Photo Credit: cocoparisienne via Pixabay
