In the largest study of its kind, researchers at the Florida Museum of Natural History have used data from a 120-year-old program managed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture to quantify the effects of introduced species.
In the largest study of its kind, researchers at the Florida Museum of Natural History have used data from a 120-year-old program managed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture to quantify the effects of introduced species.
The researchers included more than 5 million measurements from individual trees across much of eastern North America and showed the rate at which introduced species are spreading has increased over the last two decades. Additionally, native tree diversity is on the decline in areas where exotic species originally introduced by humans have encroached.
This might seem like a no-brainer. If you increase the number of non-native species, it makes sense that the number of natives would go down. But no one’s actually demonstrated that this happens at a large scale before.
“There’s this assumption that introduced species are not a good thing, but we don’t always know what that means,” said study co-author Doug Soltis, a distinguished professor at the Florida Museum. “People have tried to get at their impact using fine-scale studies. What this paper does is take a more macro-level approach.”
Read more at Florida Museum of Natural History
Photo Credit: analogicus via Pixabay
