ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2020
Darwin's naturalization conundrum can be explained by spatial scale.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 33 papers.
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Who cites it
33 citing papers in PubMed.
- Repeated trends in altitudinal gradients of diversity: How habitat filtering and biotic interactions structure ecological communities.The Journal of animal ecology · 2026Article
- The extension of the taxon cycle model to island plants: insights from the Canarian vascular flora.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2026Article
- Plants That Evolved Under High Phylogenetic Diversity Have Higher Invasion Success, Particularly in Undisturbed Communities.Ecology letters · 2026Article
- Competitive interactions during community assembly: how native species identity, diversity, and functional traits affect invasion.Oecologia · 2026Article
- Ecological similarities and dissimilarities between donor and recipient regions shape global plant naturalizations.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Evidence for environmental filtering and limiting similarity depends on spatial scale and dissimilarity metrics.Ecology · 2025Article
- Species invasion and phylogenetic relatedness of vascular plants on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, the roof of the world.Plant diversity · 2025Article
- Global drivers of the conservation-invasion paradox.Conservation biology : the journal of the Society for Conservation Biology · 2025Article
- Phylogenetically close alien Asteraceae species with minimal niche overlap are more likely to invade.Plant diversity · 2025Article
- Ecological similarity governs non-native fish establishment while human pressure and native diversity shape invasion richness.Science advances · 2025Article
- Rare species do not disproportionately contribute to phylogenetic diversity in a subalpine plant community.American journal of botany · 2025Article
- Indirect role of climatic suitability in mediating the effects of plant characteristics on naturalization success of cultivated alien plants in Southern Africa.Biological invasions · 2025Article
- An unprotected vulnerable relict subtropical conifer-Plant diversity · 2024Article
- Role of plant functional traits in the invasion success: analysis of nine species of Asteraceae.BMC plant biology · 2024Article
- Global freshwater fish invasion linked to the presence of closely related species.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Constructing a database of alien plants in the Himalaya to test patterns structuring diversity.Ecology and evolution · 2024Article
- Review
- A latitudinal gradient in Darwin's naturalization conundrum at the global scale for flowering plants.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Article
- Intercontinental comparison of phylogenetic relatedness in introduced plants at the transition from naturalization to invasion: A case study on the floras of South Africa and China.Plant diversity · 2023Article
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5 authors.
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Abstract
Darwin proposed two seemingly contradictory hypotheses regarding factors influencing the outcome of biological invasions. He initially posited that nonnative species closely related to native species would be more likely to successfully establish, because they might share adaptations to the local environment (preadaptation hypothesis). However, based on observations that the majority of naturalized plant species in the United States belonged to nonnative genera, he concluded that the lack of competitive exclusion would facilitate the establishment of alien invaders phylogenetically distinct from the native flora (competition-relatedness hypothesis). To date, no consensus has been reached regarding these opposing hypotheses. Here, following Darwin, we use the flora of the United States to examine patterns of taxonomic and phylogenetic relatedness between native and nonnative taxa across thousands of nested locations ranging in size and extent, from local to regional scales. We find that the probability of observing the signature of environmental filtering over that of competition increases with spatial scale. Further, native and nonnative species tended to be less related in warm, humid environments. Our work provides an empirical assessment of the role of observation scale and climate in biological invasions and demonstrates that Darwin's two opposing hypotheses need not be mutually exclusive.
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