School of Life Sciences' Friday Seminar

September 4, 3:30pm - 4:30pm
Mānoa Campus, Bilger 150

"Projecting Invasive Grass Responses to a Changing Climate in HawaiÊ»i" Speaker: Dr. Curtis Daehler, Professor, School of Life Sciences, ÌÇÐÄÊÓƵ ²ÑÄå²Ô´Ç²¹. **** Abstract: Understanding invasive plant responses to climate change is important for developing proactive invasion prevention, management and control plans. Invasive grasses are of particular concern because many of them pose wildfire risks; furthermore, the grass family includes many thousands of potential species introductions, most of which have not yet spread widely in the Hawaiian Islands. I will present findings from two studies from my lab using species distribution modeling (SDM) as a tool to explore potential introduced grass distributions and range shifts in response to a moderate climate change scenario. The first study examined potential differences in climate change response among three major grass photosynthetic groupings. Comparison of these photosynthetic types indicates that they will likely have differing range responses to climate change. Because of this, knowledge of grass photosynthetic type may be a useful component of risk assessment for introduced grasses. A second study focused on grasses that pose the highest wildfire risk in HawaiÊ»i, comparing expected current and future distributions of well-established invasive grasses to grasses that are currently limited in distribution and could be feasible targets for eradication. Considering modeled future distributions of total land area at risk, we found that the contribution of each successive invader to the cumulative fire risk area declines steeply, revealing a saturating risk accumulation curve with the addition of new grass invaders. This suggests that, in at least some heavily invaded systems, preventing new invasions may yield diminishing returns unless established invaders are suppressed simultaneously. Invader risk saturation may be an emerging feature of multi-species invasions, reflecting the same redundancy-driven saturation documented in biodiversity–ecosystem function studies.


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School of Life Sciences, Mānoa Campus

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