Vulnerability of non-native invasive plants to novel pathogen attack: do plant traits matter?

Uncovering subtle mechanisms hindering the efficacy of biological control in plant invasions

“…The study also raises questions about how common these findings may be and what factors may make certain invasive plants more likely to cause ‘soil‐mediated self‐reinforcement’. Recent work from my laboratory explored whether certain combinations of invasive plant traits may make them more susceptible to pathogen attack capable of causing population declines in the introduced range (Fahey et al ., 2022). Specifically, we proposed a framework to predict such type of pathogen susceptibility.…”