One of the most important disturbances of roads is the facilitation of the increase of non-native invasive species into adjacent plant communities. The rupestrian fields of Serra do Cipo´, a montane grassland ecosystem in southeastern Brazil, are recognized for their enormous richness of species and endemism rates. The presence of non-native invasive species in this ecosystem could threaten the existence of the native flora and its associated organisms. The aim of this study is to understand how non-native invasive species and native species are distributed along paved and unpaved roads, in a montaneous grassland ecosystem such as the Brazilian rupestrian fields. The two road surfaces provide differing gradients from their edges with respect to nutrients, soil chemical aspects and plant species diversity. High content of calcium at the roadside in the paved road resulted from the paving process, in which limestone gravel is used in one of the several paving phases. In these newly created habitats the toxicity of aluminum is drastically reduced and nutrient enriched, hence representing favorable sites from where non-native invasive species are capable to colonize and grow for undetermined period waiting the chance to invade the adjacent pristine habitats. Disturbances provoked by any natural or humancaused event can provide the opportunity for the nonnative invasive species to colonize new plant communities.

The orange cup coral Tubastraea coccinea was the first scleractinean to invade the western Atlantic. The species occurs throughout the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea and has now established itself in the southwest Atlantic along the Brazilian coast. T. coccinea modifies native benthic communities, competes with an endemic coral species and demonstrates widespread invasive potential. We used species distribution modeling (SDM) to predict climatically suitable habitats for T. coccinea along the coastline of the southwestern Atlantic and identify the extent of the putative effects of this species on the native coral Mussismilia hispida by estimating areas of potential overlap between these species. The resulting SDMs predicted a large area of climatically suitable habitat available for invasion by T. coccinea and also predicted widespread occurrence of the endemic M. hispida along the Brazilian coast. The prediction of the T. coccinea distribution model suggests that suitable environmental conditions for the species occur throughout most of the littoral zone, including most of Brazil's marine protected areas. The overlap of the SDMs of M. hispida and T. coccinea revealed a large area with high habitat suitability for both species. Considering the invasive potential of T. coccinea and its ecological consequences, we concluded that this alien species could change the benthic communities of most of the shallow Brazilian coast and, as the invasive and native coral species have been shown to be antagonistic, T. coccinea represents a serious threat to M. hispida throughout most of its potential geographical distribution.