The maximum relative growth rate of common UK plant species is positively associated with their global invasiveness

Abstract

Aim: An emerging consensus in invasion ecology is that faster-growing alien plantspecies tend to be more invasive than slower-growing species. However, phylogeneticnon-independence and the precision of growth-rate measures often remainunaccounted for in comparative studies.We tested whether global invasiveness wasrelated to mean and maximum relative growth rate of 105 plant species (101 nativeand 4 introduced) commonly occurring in the UK.Location: Global.Methods: We combined a unique experimental dataset of relative growth rates(RGR) measured under standardized experimental conditions for plant species thatoccur widely in the UK with our global measures of invasiveness, which were thenumber of references in the Global Compendium of Weeds (GCW) and thenumber of world regions invaded.We weighted mean RGR measures per species byincluding variances of RGR in our analyses, and we also conducted analyses withand without phylogenetic structure, to account for potential phylogenetic nonindependencein RGR.Results: We found a positive association between global invasiveness andmaximum RGR. In addition, this association was not confounded by phylogeneticcorrelation, or by species seed mass.Main conclusions: The results from this study suggest that faster-growing speciesare more widespread at a global scale, adding support to other studies that suggestfaster-growing alien plant species tend to be more invasive in the introduced range.