Climate change opens new avenue for spread of invas...( GAINESVILLE Fla. Plants that range ...)

GAINESVILLE, Fla. Plants that range northward because of climate change may be better at defending themselves against local enemies than native plants.

So concludes a team of scientists including a University of Florida geneticist. The team's findings, reported in today's online edition of Nature, suggest that certain plants could become invasive if they spread to places that were previously too cold for them.

"This paper is the first to suggest that the mechanisms that aid invasive species when they move from one continent to the next may actually work within continents when climate change gradually extends the distributional range of a species," said Koen J.F. Verhoeven, an evolutionary biologist at The Netherlands Institute of Ecology. "Plants may be able to outrun, so to speak, their enemies from the southern range."

Often, exotic plants and animals are introduced to new continents or geographic regions by travelers and commerce. Separation from their natural enemies can drive their invasive success in the new range. But, increasingly, the distribution of many species is shifting because of climate change and changes in land use.

Led by scientists Tim Engelkes, Elly Morrin and Wim van der Putten of The Netherlands Institute of Ecology, with collaborators from the University of Florida, Wageningen University and Leiden University, the researchers compared exotic plant species that had recently established in Millingerwaard, a nature preserve in The Netherlands, with related native plant species from the same area.

"We set out to see whether the native and exotics responded differently to natural enemies such as herbivores or microorganisms in the soil," said Lauren McIntyre, an associate professor of molecular genetics and microbiology in UF's College of Medicine and a member of the UF Genetics Institute. "UF helped develop a statistical model that took into account the experimental design and had good po
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