The Invasion Hierarchy: Ecological and Evolutionary Consequences of Invasions in the Fossil Record

Species invasions are pervasive in Earth history, yet the ecological and evolutionary consequences vary greatly. Ancient invasion events can be organized in a hierarchy of increasing invasion intensity from ephemeral invasions to globally pervasive invasive regimes. Each level exhibits emergent properties exceeding the sum of interactions at lower levels. Hierarchy levels correspond to, but do not always exactly correlate with, geographic extent of invasion success. The ecological impacts of lower-level impacts can be negligible or result in temporary community accommodation. Invasion events at moderate to high levels of the hierarchy permanently alter ecological communities, regional faunas, and global ecosystems. The prevalence of invasive species results in evolutionary changes by fostering niche evolution, differential survival of ecologically generalized taxa, faunal homogenization, and suppressing speciation. These impacts can contribute to mass extinctions and biodiversity crises that alter the trajectory of ecological and evolutionary patterns of life. The fossil record provides a long-term record of how invasion impacts may scale up through time, which can augment ecological studies of modern species invasions.

• Publication year

  2019

• Venue

  Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution and Systematics

• Publication date

  2019-11-04

• Fields of study

  Biology, Geography, Environmental Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1146/ANNUREV-ECOLSYS-110617-062638
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

• No references are available for this paper.

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