Forestry management worldwide has become increasingly effective at obtaining high timber yields from productive forests. In New Zealand, a focus on improving an increasingly successful and largely Pinus radiata plantation forestry model over the last 150 years has resulted in some of the most productive timber forests in the temperate zone. In contrast to this success, the full range of forested landscapes across New Zealand, including native forests, are impacted by an array of pressures from introduced pests, diseases, and a changing climate, presenting a collective risk of losses in biological, social and economic value.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe factors that promote invasive behavior in introduced plant species occur across many scales of biological and ecological organization. Factors that act at relatively small scales, for example, the evolution of biological traits associated with invasiveness, scale up to shape species distributions among different climates and habitats, as well as other characteristics linked to invasion, such as attractiveness for cultivation (and by extension propagule pressure). To identify drivers of invasion it is therefore necessary to disentangle the contribution of multiple factors that are interdependent.
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