Propagule Pressure and Soil Disturbance Diminish Plant Community Resistance to Invasion Across Habitat Types
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT Questions Community resistance to non‐native plant invasions results from intrinsic habitat characteristics, propagule pressure, and the presence of disturbance. Species identity further complicates this relationship due to pre‐existing adaptations. Despite these mechanisms being understood in isolation, their interplay is rarely explored in natural field communities. Furthermore, while survey studies have reported levels of invasion across habitat types, few have quantified differences in intrinsic invasibility experimentally. Location Roy Berg Kinsella Research Ranch, Alberta, Canada. Methods We manipulated soil disturbance and propagule pressure in three habitat types (aspen forest, shrub vegetation, and prairie grassland) and examined their impact on the germination success of three pairs of phylogenetically similar native and non‐native plant species ( Bromus ciliatus / B. inermis , Elymus trachycaulus / Agropyron cristatum , Poa secunda / P. pratensis ) for 3 months after seed addition. Results Habitats played a crucial role in determining resistance to invasion, with aspen forest exhibiting the highest germination rates and invasibility and prairie grassland the lowest. High propagule pressure significantly increased invasibility across all habitat types and genera, and its impact was most pronounced when combined with soil disturbance, though this was contingent on genus. Invasive Bromus had higher germination compared to its native congener, even in the absence of disturbance. However, native Elymus and Poa species had equal or greater germination compared to their non‐native counterparts. Conclusions Our results underline that propagule pressure, disturbance, and species identity interact as drivers of plant community invasibility. Furthermore, our study demonstrated that habitat types differ in their intrinsic resistance to invasions. While aspen forests have greater invasibility, grasslands are more invaded than their resistance suggests. Thus, invasibility contrasts with levels of invasion reported in field surveys, supporting previous suggestions that these attributes do not always align.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".