Climatic suitability ranking of biological control candidates: a biogeographic approach for ragweed management in Europe

作者：Yan Sun, Olivier Brönnimann, George K. Roderick, A. N. Poltavsky, Suzanne T. E. Lommen, Heinz Müller‐Schärer · 发表于：Ecosphere · 年份：2017 · DOI：10.1002/ecs2.1731 · 被引用次数：67 · 研究领域：Species Distribution and Climate Change、Biological Control of Invasive Species、Ecology and Vegetation Dynamics Studies

Abstract Biological control using natural antagonists has been a most successful management tool against alien invasive plants that threaten biodiversity. The selection of candidate agents remains a critical step in a biocontrol program before more elaborate and time‐consuming experiments are conducted. Here, we propose a biogeographic approach to identify candidates and combinations of candidates to potentially cover a large range of the invader. We studiedAmbrosia artemisiifolia(common ragweed), native to North America (NA) and invasive worldwide, and sixNAbiocontrol candidates for the introduced Europe (EU) range of ragweed, both under current and future bioclimatic conditions. For the first time, we constructed species distribution models based on worldwide occurrences and important bioclimatic variables simultaneously for a plant invader and its biocontrol candidates in view of selecting candidates that potentially cover a large range of the target invader. Ordination techniques were used to explore climatic constraints of each species and to perform niche overlap tests with ragweed. We show a large overlap in climatic space between candidates and ragweed, but a considerable discrepancy in geographic range overlap betweenEU(31.4%) andNA(83.3%). This might be due to niche unfilling and expansion of ragweed inEUand the fact that habitats with high ragweed occurrences inEUare rare inNAand predicted to be unsuitable for the candidates. Total geographic range of all candidate...