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Economic use of plants is key to their naturalization success

van Kleunen, Mark; Xu, Xinyi; Yang, Qiang; Maurel, Noëlie; Zhang, Zhijie; Dawson, Wayne; Essl, Franz; Kreft, Holger; Pergl, Jan; Pyšek, Petr; Weigelt, Patrick; Moser, Dietmar; Lenzner, Bernd; Fristoe, Trevor S.

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Authors

Mark van Kleunen

Xinyi Xu

Qiang Yang

Noëlie Maurel

Zhijie Zhang

Franz Essl

Holger Kreft

Jan Pergl

Petr Pyšek

Patrick Weigelt

Dietmar Moser

Bernd Lenzner

Trevor S. Fristoe



Abstract

Humans cultivate thousands of economic plants (i.e. plants with economic value) outside their native ranges. To analyze how this contributes to naturalization success, we combine global databases on economic uses and naturalization success of the world’s seed plants. Here we show that naturalization likelihood is 18 times higher for economic than non-economic plants. Naturalization success is highest for plants grown as animal food or for environmental uses (e.g. ornamentals), and increases with number of uses. Taxa from the Northern Hemisphere are disproportionately over-represented among economic plants, and economic plants from Asia have the greatest naturalization success. In regional naturalized floras, the percentage of economic plants exceeds the global percentage and increases towards the equator. Phylogenetic patterns in the naturalized flora partly result from phylogenetic patterns in the plants we cultivate. Our study illustrates that accounting for the intentional introduction of economic plants is key to unravelling drivers of plant naturalization.

Citation

van Kleunen, M., Xu, X., Yang, Q., Maurel, N., Zhang, Z., Dawson, W., …Fristoe, T. S. (2020). Economic use of plants is key to their naturalization success. Nature Communications, 11(1), Article 3201. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-16982-3

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Jun 2, 2020
Online Publication Date Jun 24, 2020
Publication Date 2020
Deposit Date Jul 8, 2020
Publicly Available Date Mar 29, 2024
Journal Nature Communications
Publisher Nature Research
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 11
Issue 1
Article Number 3201
DOI https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-16982-3

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This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.




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