Petr Pyšek

The Czech Academy of Sciences | AVCR · Institute of Botany, Pruhonice

There has been a dramatic growth in research on biological invasions over the past 20 years, but a mature understanding of the field has been hampered because invasion biologists concerned with different taxa and different environments have largely adopted different model frameworks for the invasion process, resulting in a confusing range of concep...

With the growing body of literature assessing the impact of invasive alien plants on resident species and ecosystems, a comprehensive assessment of the relationship between invasive species traits and environmental settings of invasion on the characteristics of impacts is needed. Based on 287 publications with 1551 individual cases that addressed t...

All around the globe, humans have greatly altered the abiotic and biotic environment with ever-increasing speed. One defining feature of the Anthropocene epoch is the erosion of biogeographical barriers by human-mediated dispersal of species into new regions, where they can naturalize and cause ecological, economic and social damage. So far, no com...

Using the recently built Global Naturalized Alien Flora (GloNAF) database, containing data on the distribution of naturalized alien plants in 482 mainland and 362 island regions of the world, we describe patterns in diversity and geographic distribution of naturalized and invasive plant species, taxonomic, phylogenetic and life-history structure of...

Biological invasions are a global consequence of an increasingly connected world and the rise in human population size. The numbers of invasive alien species – the subset of alien species that spread widely in areas where they are not native, affecting the environment or human livelihoods – are increasing. Synergies with other global changes are ex...

Arable habitats (i.e. fields, orchards, vineyards, and their fallows) were created by humans and have been essential elements in Central European landscapes for several thousand years. In recent decades, these habitats were drastically altered by changes in land use as well as agricultural practices and, more recently, by climate change. These chan...

It is increasingly recognized that the factors facilitating plant invasions depend on the stage along the introduction‐naturalization‐invasion continuum. Adaptative strategies, i.e., combinations of functional traits that represent overall fitness in the face of one or more selection pressures, have shown promise in explaining plant invasions. Howe...

Soil seed viability and germinability dynamics can have a major influence on the establishment and spread of plants introduced beyond their native distribution range. Yet, we lack information on how temporal variability in these traits could affect the invasion process. To address this issue, we conducted an 8-year seed burial experiment examining...

Common myna (Acridotheres tristis) is a passerine bird native to south-east Asia, established as an alien in many parts of the world including South Africa, where it is invasive. Common mynas are synanthropic birds with a strong preference for urban areas that usually do not expand into natural areas. However, as we document here, since the first r...

We examine how the climatic niches of North American tree and tall‐shrub species change after their introduction to Europe and how these shifts affect their potential geographical distributions in the new range. We ask whether patterns of niche shifts differ among species confined to different biomes in North America and whether the expansions of s...

When evaluating forests in terms of their biodiversity, distinctiveness and naturalness, the affinity of the constituent species to forests is a crucial parameter. Here we ask to what extent are vascular plant species associated with forests, and does species’ affinity to forests vary between European regions? Temperate and boreal forest biome of N...

Island disharmony refers to the biased representation of higher taxa on islands compared to their mainland source regions and represents a central concept in island biology. Here, we develop a generalizable framework for approximating these source regions and conduct the first global assessment of island disharmony and its underlying drivers. We co...

As human communities become increasingly interconnected through transport and trade, there has been a concomitant rise in both accidental and intentional species introductions, resulting in biological invasions. A warming global climate and the rapid movement of people and vessels across the globe have opened new air and sea routes, accelerated pro...

Despite the paramount role of plant diversity for ecosystem functioning, biogeochemical cycles, and human welfare, knowledge of its global distribution is incomplete, hampering basic research and biodiversity conservation. Here, we used machine learning (random forests, extreme gradient boosting, neural networks) and conventional statistical method...

We present the first inventory and status assessment of the alien flora of Oman, mainly based on field data collected from 1998 to 2021. The study provides (i) a comprehensive account of alien vascular plant species occurring in the wild in Oman, with information on their taxonomic composition. For each species information is given on (ii) invasion...

Using the Global Naturalized Alien Flora (GloNAF) database, this chapter describes the patterns in regional diversity of naturalized alien plants in Europe. GloNAF registered 4139 naturalized plant taxa, which makes Europe the second richest continent after North America, and represents an increase by 390 taxa (or 9.6%) compared to the inventory co...

This chapter covers the likely impact of projected changes in climate on soil seed bank abundance, persistence and diversity as well as the role of seed banks in species range shifts.

Species characteristics and cultivation are both associated with alien plant naturalization and invasiveness. Particular species characteristics are favoured for cultivation, obscuring the relationship between traits and naturalization success. We sought to better understand the drivers of naturalization and invasiveness by analysing relationships...

Large‐scale biodiversity data, e.g. on species distribution and richness information, are being mobilized and becoming available at an increasing rate. Interactive web applications like atlases have been developed to visualize available datasets and make them accessible to a wider audience. Web mapping tools are changing rapidly, and different unde...

To identify factors that drive plant species richness in South-African savanna and explore their relative importance, we sampled plant communities across habitats difering in water availability, disturbance, and bedrock, using the Kruger National Park as a model system. We made plant inventories in 60 plots of 50 × 50 m, located in three distinct h...

Supplementary information for Yang et al. The global loss of floristic uniqueness

Regional species assemblages have been shaped by colonization, speciation and extinction over millions of years. Humans have altered biogeography by introducing species to new ranges. However, an analysis of how strongly naturalized plant species (i.e. alien plants that have established self-sustaining populations) affect the taxonomic and phylogen...

Darwin’s naturalization hypothesis predicts successful invaders to be distantly related to native species, whereas his pre-adaptation hypothesis predicts the opposite. It has been suggested that depending on the invasion stage (i.e. introduction, naturalization, and invasiveness), both hypotheses, now known as Darwin’s naturalization conundrum, cou...

Aims The rapid increase in the number of species that have naturalized beyond their native range is among the most apparent features of the Anthropocene. How alien species will respond to other processes of future global changes is an emerging concern and remains poorly misunderstood. We therefore ask whether naturalized species will respond to cli...

The patchy distribution of trees typical of savannas often results in a discontinuous distribution of water, nutrient resources, and microbial communities in soil, commonly referred to as “islands of fertility”. We assessed how this phenomenon may affect the establishment and impact of invasive plants, using the invasion of Opuntia stricta in South...

Context dependence is widely invoked to explain disparate results in ecology. It arises when the magnitude or sign of a relationship varies due to the conditions under which it is observed. Such variation, especially when unexplained, can lead to spurious or seemingly contradictory conclusions, which can limit understanding and our ability to trans...

Plant colonization of islands may be limited by the availability of symbionts, particularly arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi, which have limited dispersal ability compared to ectomycorrhizal and ericoid (EEM) as well as orchid mycorrhizal (ORC) fungi. We tested for such differential island colonization within contemporary angiosperm floras worldwi...

The interspecific plant interactions along grazing and aridity stress gradients represent a major research issue in plant ecology. However, the combined effects of these two factors on plant-plant interactions have been poorly studied in the northeast of Iran. To fill this knowledge gap, 144 plots were established in 12 study sites with different g...

Pervasive human-induced environmental changes are increasingly causing species to move, with profound implications for their conservation and survival (e.g. Chen et al. 2011; Dawson et al. 2011). In a recently published piece on “Global policy for assisted colonization of species”, Brodie et al. (2021) call for assisted colonisation (also called ma...

Many plant species native to Europe have naturalized worldwide. We tested whether the phylogenetic structure of the species pools of European habitats is related to the proportion of species from each habitat that has naturalized outside Europe (habitat’s donor role) and whether the donated species are more phylogenetically related to each other th...

Assessing the impacts of alien plant species is scientifically important and critical for supporting invasion-related policies. Generic Impact Scoring System (GISS) and Environmental Impact Classification for Alien Taxa (EICAT) are standardized schemes to evaluate, compare, and eventually predict the magnitudes of the variety of impacts invasive sp...

With globalisation facilitating the movement of plants and seeds beyond the native range, preventing potentially harmful introductions requires knowledge of what drives the successful establishment and spread of alien plants. Here, we examined global‐scale relationships between naturalisation success (incidence and extent) and invasiveness, soil se...

Invasive alien plants are known to reduce the diversity of recipient communities. However, there is an ongoing debate on whether or not native dominant species have similar effects. To answer this question, we compared herbaceous dominant species of plant communities in central Europe, 10 of which were native and nine alien to this region. We sampl...

Regeneration from vegetative fragments is common in plants that occur in disturbed and wet habitats but quantitative data comparing regeneration of different plant parts under various environmental conditions are still scarce. Phragmites australis is a dominant and a keystone wetland species that is widespread all around the world. It spreads both...

The Pacific Region has the highest density of naturalised plant species worldwide, which makes it an important area for research on the ecology, evolution and biogeography of biological invasions. While different data sources on naturalised plant species exist for the Pacific, there is no taxonomically and spatially harmonised database available fo...

Citation Guo, Qinfeng et al. (2021), Data from: Latitudinal patterns of alien plant invasions, v4, Dataset, https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.qnk98sfd8 Abstract Latitudinal patterns of biodiversity have long been a central topic in ecology and evolutionary biology. However, while most previous studies have focused on native species, little effort has b...

Aridity and intensive grazing have been confirmed to affect the facilitative effects of dryland shrubs. However, their combined effects on plant-plant interactions have rarely been tested. To test how these two factors affect relations between plants, we analyzed 144 plots (under shrub canopy vs. open areas) at 12 sampling areas established in the...

Studies on plant invasions depend on local and regional checklists of the alien flora. However, global overview studies have shown that some regions, including many African countries, remain understudied in this regard. To contribute to filling this gap, here we present the first checklist of alien plants of Sudan and South Sudan (the Sudans). We a...

Alien species in urban areas have a large effect on overall species diversity. A suitable metric of flora's response to environmental change is functional diversity (FD) that refers to the multivariate space of species' trait compositions, reflecting their ecological niches. We studied how FD changed over 320 years of urbanization in the city of Ha...

Aim The number of naturalized (i.e. established) alien species has increased rapidly over recent centuries. Given the differences in environmental tolerances among species, little is known about what factors determine the extent to which the observed size of the naturalized range of a species and hence the extent to which the observed richness of n...

Aim The number of alien species has been increasing for centuries world-wide, but temporal changes in the dynamics of their inter-regional spread remain unclear. Here, we analyse changes in the rate and extent of inter-regional spread of alien species over time and how these dynamics vary among major taxonomic groups. Location Global. Time period...

Aim: The Pacific exhibits an exceptional number of naturalized plant species, but the drivers of this high diversity and the associated compositional patterns remain largely unknown. Here, we aim to (a) improve our understanding of introduction and establishment processes and (b) evaluate whether this information is sufficient to create scientific...

Understanding drivers of success for alien species can inform on potential future invasions. Recent conceptual advances highlight that species may achieve invasiveness via performance along at least three distinct dimensions: 1) local abundance, 2) geographic range size, and 3) habitat breadth in naturalized distributions. Associations among these...

Digital data provides a huge source of information that could be used to assess the distribution, life history, and spread dynamics of invasive alien species. Digitally generated and stored data can reveal ecological patterns and processes that would otherwise be very difficult to study; this approach has recently emerged as iEcology. Here we apply...

Questions The human‐related spread of alien plants has serious environmental and socioeconomic impacts. Therefore, it is important to know which habitats are most threatened by invasion and why. We studied a wide range of European grasslands to assess: (a) which alien species are the most successful invaders in grasslands; (b) how invasion levels d...

Introduction Biological invasions are a major threat to global biodiversity and can have substantial socioeconomic costs. Although invasive non–native species have been studied extensively, their monitoring and management are often inadequate (Pergl et al. 2020). Moreover, the great harm invasive non–native species cause tends to be underestimated...

Questions European woodlands harbor at least 386 alien plant species but the factors driving local invasions remain unknown. By using a large vegetation‐plot database, we asked how local richness and abundance of alien species vary by regions, elevation, climate, soil properties, human disturbance, and habitat types. Location Western, Central and S...

The Pladias (Plant Diversity Analysis and Synthesis) Database of the Czech Flora and Vegetation was developed by the Pladias project team in 2014-2018 and has been continuously updated since then. The flora section of the database contains critically revised information on the Czech vascular flora, including 13.6 million plant occurrence records, w...

A herbarium specimen of Heracleum mantegazzianum collected in 1871 in the spa of Teplice in northern Bohemia by Lajos Haynald, archbishop of Kalocsa-Bács in Hungary, was recently found in the Hungarian Natural History Museum in Budapest (herbarium BP). To our knowledge, this is the earliest preserved specimen of this invasive species from the terri...

Island disharmony refers to the biased representation of higher taxa on islands compared to their mainland source regions and represents a central concept in island biology. Here, we develop a generalizable framework for approximating these source regions and conduct the first global assessment of island disharmony and its underlying drivers. We co...

To study the role that public parks play as sources of invasions, we surveyed 89 sites in the Czech Republic, comprising chateau parks in urban areas and countryside in various landscapes and socioeconomic contexts, in order to build complete inventories of alien taxa spontaneously spreading outside cultivation in parks or from their surroundings....

Unprecedented rates of introduction and spread of non-native species pose burgeoning challenges to biodiversity, natural resource management, regional economies, and human health. Current biosecurity efforts are failing to keep pace with globalization, revealing critical gaps in our understanding and response to invasions. Here, we identify four pr...

Island species and habitats are particularly vulnerable to human disturbances, and anthropogenic changes are increasingly overwriting natural island biogeographic patterns. However, quantitative comparisons of how native and alien assemblages respond to human disturbances are scarce. Using data from 6,242 species of vertebrates, invertebrates and p...

Latitudinal patterns of biodiversity have long been a central topic in ecology and evolutionary biology. However, while most previous studies have focused on native species , little effort has been devoted to latitudinal patterns of plant invasions (with a few exceptions based on data from sparse locations). Using the most up-to-date worldwide nati...