COS 36-3 - Understanding the Ecological Context for Garlic Mustard Invasion

Monday, August 15, 2022

4:00 PM – 4:15 PM EDT

Location: 516A

Presenting Author(s)

SS

Sara Scanga

Utica University, New York, United States

Coauthor(s)

VR

Vikki L. Rodgers

Babson College, Massachusetts, United States
MK

Mary Beth Kolozsvary

Siena College
Loudonville, New York, United States
DG

Danielle Garneau

SUNY Plattsburgh, New York, United States
Jason S. Kilgore

Professor of Biology
Washington & Jefferson College
Washington, Pennsylvania, United States
LA

Laurel J. Anderson

Ohio Wesleyan University
Delaware, Ohio, United States
KH

Kristine Hopfensperger

Northern Kentucky University, Kentucky, United States
AA

Anna Aguilera

Simmons University, Massachusetts, United States
RU

Rebecca Urban

Lebanon Valley College, Pennsylvania, United States
KJ

Kevyn Juneau

University of Wisconsin - River Falls, Wisconsin, United States

Background/Question/Methods

The invasive plant Alliaria petiolata (garlic mustard) has spread throughout forest understory and edge communities in much of North America, but its persistence, density, and impacts have varied across sites and over time. To evaluate our understanding of the ecological context for garlic mustard invasions, we analyzed how and where garlic mustard has been studied by surveying the 125 garlic mustard field studies that have been published since 2008. Using these data, we consider potential mechanisms for garlic mustard invasion together and with acknowledgment of their respective spatial and temporal scales and potential interactions. For each study, we determined the number of sites sampled, spatial scale, and geographic location, and then aggregated this information over the 13-year period.

Results/Conclusions

We found a lack of multi-site and macroscale studies in the literature since 2008. The median number of sites per study remained close to 1 over the 13-year period, and most studies sampled ≤5 sites. Although regional-scale studies for garlic mustard are becoming more common over time, they lag well behind single-site studies and small-scale multi-site studies that occur within just 1 – 2 states/provinces. Studies are also unevenly distributed across garlic mustard’s range; many studies have occurred in the northeast and midwest United States and Ontario, but other regions of the range are poorly studied or ignored. In contrast, certain sites within the well-sampled portion of garlic mustard’s range have appeared in multiple studies. We conclude that these limitations in the current approaches to garlic mustard invasion research may lead to poor representation for understanding and predicting future garlic mustard invasion dynamics, and we suggest a macrosystems approach for improving understanding of the ecological context for garlic mustard invasion. Our model emphasizes the importance of synergies and feedbacks among mechanisms across spatial and temporal scales to produce variable ecological contexts.