Darwin's naturalization hypothesis: scale matters in coastal plant communities.

ABSTRACT: Darwin proposed two seemingly contradictory hypotheses for a better understanding of biological invasions. Strong relatedness of invaders to native communities as an indication of niche overlap could promote naturalization because of appropriate niche adaptation, but could also hamper naturalization because of negative interactions with native species ('Darwin's naturalization hypothesis'). Although these hypotheses provide clear and opposing predictions for expected patterns of species relatedness in invaded communities, so far no study has been able to clearly disentangle the underlying mechanisms. We hypothesize that conflicting past results are mainly due to the neglected role of spatial resolution of the community sampling. In this study, we corroborate both of Darwin's expectations b

SUBMITTER: Carboni M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4028616 | biostudies-literature | 2013 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature