Diet breadth influences how the impact of invasive plants is propagated through food webs.
Invasive plants are considered a major cause of ecosystem degradation worldwide. While their impacts on native plants have been widely reported, there is little information on how these impacts propagate through food webs and affect species at higher trophic levels. Using a quantitative food web approach we evaluated the impacts of an invasive plant on plant-herbivore-parasitoid communities, asking specifically how diet breadth influences the propagation of such impacts. Measuring the impact of the alien plant at the plant level seriously underestimated the community-level effect of this weed as it also caused changes in the abundance of native herbivores and parasitoids, along with a decrease in parasitoid species richness. The invading plant affected specialist and generalist subsets of communities differently, having significant and strong negative impacts on the abundance of all specialists with no negative effect on generalist consumers. Specialist consumer decline led to further disruptions of top-down regulatory mechanisms, releasing generalist species from competition via shared natural enemies. Plant invasion also significantly increased the evenness of species abundance of all trophic levels in the food webs, as well as the evenness of species interaction frequency. Extending impact evaluation to higher trophic levels and considering changes in trophic diversity within levels is hence essential for a full evaluation of the consequences of invasion by alien plants. Moreover, information on diet breadth of species in the invaded community should be taken into account when evaluating/predicting the impacts on any introduced species.
Carvalheiro
Luisa G
LG
University of Bristol, School of Biological Sciences, Woodland Road, Bristol BS8 1UG, United Kingdom.
Buckley
Yvonne M
YM
Memmott
Jane
J
D000818:Animals; D003247:Conservation of Natural Resources; D004032:Diet; D005247:Feeding Behavior; D020387:Food Chain; D006790:Host-Parasite Interactions; D007313:Insecta / Q000502:physiology*; D010944:Plants / Q000145:classification* / Q000469:parasitology; D006113:United Kingdom