“…Spatial heterogeneity of environmental factors are common in nature (Jackson and Caldwell, 1993b;Alpert and Mooney, 1996;Liu et al, 2003;Liang et al, 2007;Gao et al, 2021), and may influence exotic plant invasions (Keser et al, 2015;Chen et al, 2017;Wang et al, 2017;Liang et al, 2020). However, previous studies testing effects of soil heterogeneity on invasive plants were conducted mostly under competition-free conditions (Keser et al, 2014(Keser et al, , 2015Dong et al, 2015;Wang et al, 2017), and its effects on the invasion success of exotic plant has not been adequately addressed (Liang et al, 2020).…”