article · Nature Ecology & Evolution
Alien plant species often experience a dormant lag phase before expanding rapidly, making future ecological threats difficult to predict. An examination of over 5,700 time series covering 3,505 naturalised plant species across nine temperate and tropical regions quantified these delays and tracked shifts in climatic distribution. Lags occurred in 35% of analysed invasion events, lasting an average of 40 years and up to 320 years. Annual, self-fertilising plants were less likely to undergo lags, whereas perennial species were more prone to lengthy lags exceeding a century. Crucially, 98% of species with a lag phase occupied different climate spaces during their expansion compared to their lag phase, indicating that climate discovery and functional traits drive the transition to widespread invasion.
Invasive plants can persist quietly for decades before rapidly spreading, presenting severe challenges for biosecurity and environmental management. Knowing that a species' current distribution is a poor predictor of its ultimate spread helps conservationists and policy planners identify emerging threats earlier, accounting for climate discovery and plant traits to protect vulnerable ecosystems and agricultural lands from sudden ecological disruption.
This early-stage research could inform predictive modelling tools, biosecurity screening software, and environmental risk assessment frameworks used by conservation agencies and agricultural authorities. By incorporating plant life-history traits and climate-shift patterns into forecasting models, organisations could better anticipate future invasive outbreaks. The findings remain foundational ecological science and are currently distant from market application.
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Successful alien species may experience a period of quiescence, known as the lag phase, before becoming invasive and widespread. The existence of lags introduces severe uncertainty in risk analyses of aliens as the present state of species is a poor predictor of future distributions, invasion success and impact. Predicting a species' ability to invade and pose negative impacts requires a quantitative understanding of the commonality and magnitude of lags, environmental factors and mechanisms likely to terminate lag. Using herbarium and climate data, we analysed over 5,700 time series (species × regions) in 3,505 naturalized plant species from nine regions in temperate and tropical climates to quantify lags and test whether there have been shifts in the species' climatic space during the transition from the lag phase to the expansion phase. Lags were identified in 35% of the assessed invasion events. We detected phylogenetic signals for lag phases in temperate climate regions and that annual self-fertilizing species were less likely to experience lags. Where lags existed, they had an average length of 40 years and a maximum of 320 years. Lengthy lags (>100 years) were more likely to occur in perennial plants and less frequent in self-pollinating species. For 98% of the species with a lag phase, the climate spaces sampled during the lag period differed from those in the expansion phase based on the assessment of centroid shifts or degree of climate space overlap. Our results highlight the importance of functional traits for the onset of the expansion phase and suggest that climate discovery may play a role in terminating the lag phase. However, other possibilities, such as sampling issues and climate niche shifts, cannot be ruled out.
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DOI: 10.1038/s41559-023-02313-4
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