| Project Detail |
A closer look at invasive plants in forest communities
Invasive plants have silently infiltrated our forests, threatening the delicate balance of ecological communities. As alien species like Acer negundo spread, they alter the structure of deadwood communities, disrupting vital connections between fungi, insects, and nutrient cycling. In this context, the EU-funded ENTWINE project has emerged. The project integrates cutting-edge technologies like metabarcoding, phylogenetics, and community ecology. By studying native and invaded forests throughout Lithuania, this groundbreaking research seeks to unravel the intricate ecological web woven by invasive plants, ultimately paving the way for effective conservation strategies. The researchers will use long-read sequencing and sophisticated bioinformatics to analyse the collected data.
ENTWINE aims to understand whether and how invasive plants colonize new places, altering the structure of communities of fungus and insects linked with deadwood. The project integrates metabarcoding, phylogenetics, and community ecology to sample empirical and experimental communities that exploit native and invasive deadwood species in native and invaded forests throughout Lithuania. Exploiting long-read sequencing technologies and a bioinformatic pipeline to phase barcoding markers into Operational Taxonomic Units (OTUs), I will obtain normalised OTU richness and relative abundances and compare the ß- species, phylogenetic, and functional diversity estimates between communities. Insects and fungi exploiting and living in deadwood form entwined communities that play a critical role in nutrient cycling, wood decomposition, and pathogen control. In addition to abiotic factors like local climate, biotic factors like deadwood species and decay stage influence the structure and strength of the associations with each other and their shared habitat. The abundance and quality of deadwood correlate with the local tree composition, which shifts as the invading Acer negundo spreads and outcompetes local Alnus glutinosa trees. Insect and fungi species turnover or variation in relative abundances might then result from e.g. the local extinction of rare specialists associated with A. glutinosa, the introduction of new species associated with A. negundo deadwood, and/or the increase in abundance of generalist species. Those changes in community structure resulting from A. negundo invasions may contribute to the loss of species and their ecological functions. This indicates the need to control the spread of invasive plants to prevent the extinction of vulnerable or rare species and the importance of learning the ecological roles of undiscovered species before they vanish unnoticed. ENTWINE is developed in collaboration with the Life Sciences Centre at Vilnius University, Lithuania |
