Ecological communities are essential for maintaining ecosystem services, functions, and biodiversity, yet they are increasingly threatened by biological invasions. Globally, more than 37000 exotic species have been introduced, among which approximately 3500 exert negative impacts on native communities and have contributed to at least 60% of global species extinction events.

Theoretically, community assembly is jointly driven by environmental filtering and biotic interactions; however, invasion ecology research has long focused on the responses of exotic species to environmental factors, while paying insufficient attention to biotic interactions between exotic and native species, as well as among exotic species themselves.

Recently, the research team from the Center for Aquatic Life Big Data and Artificial Intelligence, Institute of Hydrobiology (IHB), Chinese Academy of Sciences, revealed the importance of environmental filtering and biotic interactions in driving community assembly under invasion contexts, thereby elucidating the underlying mechanisms of community assembly and biological invasion. This study was published in Global Change Biology.

The distribution of native species is primarily explained by environmental filtering, whereas the occurrence of exotic species is mainly controlled by spatial and temporal stochastic effects.

The responses of species to environmental gradients are not only dominated by functional traits but also exhibit strong phylogenetic signals.

Species association analysis further demonstrates the coexistence of competitive suppression and facilitative interactions among invasive species, indicating that biotic interactions play a critical role in shaping the distribution patterns of native and non-native species, as well as among non-native species.

These findings demonstrate that jointly considering environmental filtering, trait and phylogenetic imprints, and species co-occurrence structure is essential for understanding the decoupled co-occurrence patterns of native and non-native species under long term invasion contexts.

(Editor: MA Yun)

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