Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Global propagule dispersal
Human global traffic has increased significantly in recent history. There exists
an increased “transferability” of everything in human global society: trade
goods and services, human travel and transportation, and ideas. Swept along
with this traffic have been vastly increased opportunities of dispersal of bio-
logical propagules into available opportunity spaces. World grain traffic alone
has moved immense quantities of plant propagules over historical times,
despite our best efforts to control the more noxious forms.
Human disturbance
Landscapes and habitats around the world have been influenced by this
byproduct of human activity. Air and water pollution is ubiquitous and affects
almost all spaces on the earth's surface. Direct and indirect disturbances by
humans have altered most of these spaces and the ecological relationships in
biological communities, leaving vast new opportunity spaces open and avail-
able to species with traits allowing their exploitation.
Human values and culture
Human perception of these changes, public policy initiatives defining environ-
mental and economic harm and human aesthetic values provide heterogeneous
and often conflicting value systems to be compromised in reaching a consen-
sus on the best solutions. Contributing to the situation is a recent increase in
perceived fear of alien invasion, and a nativistic reaction to these fears.
Science of invasion biology
There is not a meaningful difference between the invasion process and the
processes of ecological community assembly, succession and the evolution of
niche differentiation by speciation. Despite this, disciplinary barriers are
apparent in the differentiation of invasion biology science in unmanaged and
managed habitats: agricultural weed biology and invasive plant biology are
often separated in the scientific academy. Both these realms are unified by dis-
turbance as a prime motivator of change in community structure. The scale of
habitats in time and space is continuous; and all communities are inter-related
and inter-dependent. Agriculturalists often do not completely embrace the
invasion process in understanding population shifts, and ecologists studying
unmanaged systems often fail to recognize the role of indirect disturbance and
dependence on adjacent agricultural habitats in the larger landscape. The sci-
ence of both will advance when the unifying principles underlying both types
of undesirable species are acknowledged in a larger view of invasion biology.
Utilizing and exploiting beneficial plant invasive species
Weed is a plant whose virtues have not been yet discovered (attributed to RW
Emerson, 1878). Imagine a world in which global warming results in Antarctic
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