The ‘rich get richer’ idea applies to plants as well?
This article discusses a study done on patterns of plant invasions. The researchers went in with the hypothesis that areas rich in native plants would be less susceptible to non-native plant invasions. This hypothesis was based on previous small-scale experiments on models that proposed that habitats of low plant diversity would be more vulnerable to such invasions. However, they discovered that this wasn’t the case at all — they found a positive correlation between areas of high native plant diversity and areas of non-native plant invasions, and this relationship strengthens as spatial scale increases. In other terms, “areas high in native species richness also support larger numbers of non‐native species,” or as the researches put it, “the rich get richer”. These conclusions were based on their comparatively much larger scale experiments; they set off plots and subplots of land all across the country several hundreds of meters squared with data collections once a year for four years. They also used long-term data collected by the Biota of North America Program over the past 20 years.
I found it interesting that the concept of “rich get richer” could be found in natural settings as well, as we mostly focus on the human aspects of concepts. Once parsed, this situation makes more sense — areas with high plant diversity would imply a habitat rich with resources, allowing greater invasive species to take root in this areas. Thus, these areas get richer in species variety (which isn’t really a good thing in this situation).
This study, while not very eye-opening in terms of the class, exposes some broader, important lessons. It shows that relying on a single sample size may be unreliable; the researchers discovered that small-scale experiments revealed much less regarding the patterns and correlations of invasion when compared to their findings from their country-scale experiments. The study, in a more unrelated sense, puts into perspective the fragility of biodiversity within our land, and scientists must find a better way to protect native species from competition and forced extinction caused by invasive species.