Distance to native niche margins explains establishment success of alien mammals
Why do some alien species introductions fail while others are successful? One key hypothesis is that in order for a species to invade a new range, it must initially establish successfully in conditions within its native climatic niche (NCN). Yet, this hypothesis has largely remained untested at the level of individual release events. Using a dataset of 989 introductions of 177 mammal species worldwide, we show that climatic matching to the NCN, measured by a new Niche Margin Index (NMI), is a stronger predictor of establishment success than most previously tested life-history attributes and historical factors. Contrary to traditional climatic suitability metrics derived from species distribution models, the NMI is based on niche margins and provides a measure of how distant a site is inside or, importantly, outside the NCN. Integrating NMI as a measure of NCN-matching in risk assessments could improve efforts to prevent invasions and avoid costly eradications.
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Due to technical limitations, full-text HTML conversion of this manuscript could not be completed. However, the latest manuscript can be downloaded and accessed as a PDF.
Posted 23 Sep, 2020
Distance to native niche margins explains establishment success of alien mammals
Posted 23 Sep, 2020
Why do some alien species introductions fail while others are successful? One key hypothesis is that in order for a species to invade a new range, it must initially establish successfully in conditions within its native climatic niche (NCN). Yet, this hypothesis has largely remained untested at the level of individual release events. Using a dataset of 989 introductions of 177 mammal species worldwide, we show that climatic matching to the NCN, measured by a new Niche Margin Index (NMI), is a stronger predictor of establishment success than most previously tested life-history attributes and historical factors. Contrary to traditional climatic suitability metrics derived from species distribution models, the NMI is based on niche margins and provides a measure of how distant a site is inside or, importantly, outside the NCN. Integrating NMI as a measure of NCN-matching in risk assessments could improve efforts to prevent invasions and avoid costly eradications.
Figure 1
Figure 2
Figure 3
Due to technical limitations, full-text HTML conversion of this manuscript could not be completed. However, the latest manuscript can be downloaded and accessed as a PDF.