UC Santa Barbara

ContextAlien plant invasions challenge biodiversity conservation and ecological restoration. The transdisciplinary nature of plant invasion prevention and management requires a holistic and spatially explicit perspective, to which landscape ecology can contribute.ObjectivesWe aimed to understand how landscape ecology approaches have been applied to investigate the causes, processes, and impacts of plant invasion. Based on this analysis, we synthesized the current research opportunities and challenges in applying landscape ecology approaches to plant invasion studies.MethodsWe followed RepOrting standards for Systematic Evidence Syntheses (ROSES) to conduct the article search, screening, and analysis. We then synthesized the findings through the lens of landscape ecology-based research approaches, theoretical foundations, and methods.ResultsResearch has disproportionately focused on explaining plant invasion patterns in landscapes with landscape structure (patchiness) often used as a proxy for ecological processes, especially disturbance. Fewer studies have directly modeled processes, whether investigating the effects of invasion patterns on ecological processes or the relationship between invasion processes and other landscape patterns/processes. Effects of spatial and temporal scales were rarely studied, with limited integration of hierarchical perspectives. Pattern-based statistical landscape models integrating environmental and landscape structure variables dominated, while gradient surface and process-based models were less applied despite their potential to capture floristic gradients and link patterns and processes.ConclusionsComprehensively considering hierarchical pattern-process relationships when deploying models could help in disentangling complex invasion mechanisms and provide accurate information for invasion control. We highlighted the opportunities and advancing insights that hierarchy theory and gradient surface models could bring, as well as practical pathways for their application.