Adaptive behavior and connectance of invasive plants mediate community composition in multilayered ecological networks.

Abstract

Much evidence has shown that adaptive behavior can greatly modulate the dynamics of food webs, but little is known about how adaptive behaviors of invasive plant species affect community composition in multilayered networks. Following a proven network model, we constructed networks of native communities that are invaded by exotic plant species based on three linkage rules. We examined the effects of both adaptive behavior and network connectance of invasive plant species on the persistence of native species and diversity-invasion success relationship. Results showed that community persistence was mainly affected by the connectance of invasive plant species regardless of adaptive behavior. Given a fixed proportion (F₁) of native mutualist species linked to the invasive plant species, community persistence displayed an inverse hump-shaped relationship with the increasing proportion (F₂) of native plant species linked to the invasive plant species. Compared to the results without adaptive behavior, the adaptive behavior made most negative diversity-invasion relationship become a nonlinear U-shape at fixed proportion (F₁). In addition, the adaptive behavior made most negative diversity-invasion relationship insignificant for some proportion (F₁) when proportion (F₂) was fixed. It could even reverse this relationship if the invading species was more likely to link to native species already having fewer links than those having higher links. Our results underline the importance of considering adaptive behavior and the network degree of invasive plant species for understanding the effect of invasive species on the structure and composition of ecological networks.

Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10530-025-03601-9.