The General Trends of Genetic Diversity Change in Alien Plants’ Invasion

Abstract

Genetic diversity is associated with invasion dynamics during establishment and expansion stages by affecting the viability and adaptive potential of exotics. There have been many reports on the comparison between the genetic diversity of invasive alien species (IAS) in and out of their native habitats, but the conclusions were usually inconsistent. In this work, a standard meta-analysis of the genetic diversity of 19 invasive plants based on 26 previous studies was carried out to investigate the general trend for the change of IASs’ genetic diversity during their invasion process and its real correlation with the invasion fate. Those 26 studies were screened from a total of 3557 peer-reviewed publications from the ISI Web of Science database during the period of January 2000 to May 2022. Based on the selected studies in this work, a general reduction of IASs’ genetic diversity was found in non-native populations compared to that in native ones, while the difference was not significant. This finding suggested that regardless of the change in genetic diversity, it had no substantial effect on the outcome of the invasion process. Therefore, genetic diversity might not serve as a reliable indicator for risk assessment and prediction of invasion dynamic prediction in the case of IASs.

The Molecular Evidence for Invasive Climber Echinocystis lobata (Michx.) Torr. & A. Gray in Eastern and Central Europe

“…A recent comparative study of different invasive species did not show that the genetic diversity of the invasive populations is significantly lower than that of the pristine populations [111]. The conclusions of such analyses are not of great value due to the use of different molecular markers and different genetic parameters in various studies: in some investigations, intrapopulation indices, such as the percentage of polymorphic loci in populations (P%), Nei's index of the genetic diversity, h, the content of polymorphic information, PIC [84,106,110], while some other studies emphasize interpopulation data by presenting kinship dendrograms, differentiation (by AMOVA), and Bayesian gene clustering [112,113].…”

Plant Invasion Ecology

“…Jiang et al ( 2023) [1] reviewed articles about genetic diversity of invasive alien species in and out of their native habitats and stated that a general reduction in genetic diversity has been found more often in non-native populations than in native ones. Nevertheless, those authors concluded that a change in genetic diversity has no substantial effect on the outcome of an invasion process.…”