CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

Biological invasions and climate change are two drivers of the global change and there are many relations and feedbacks that are unexplored between these two environmental problems. I have worked deeply on biological invasions, but only recently I have concerned more seriously on climate change topics, and I found that this relation is promised. For example, it could be possible that biological invasions and it related effects could be seen globally as a consequence of climate change, since a bunch of their predicted consequences are completely according with changes driven by biological invasions. Some of them are: Given the higher atmospheric CO2 concentrations, it is expected that C3 plants will perform better than C4 ones. This prediction is completely accordingly with the fact that most of the invasive species are C3 plants. In the case of study that I developed in PhD thesis, not only the invasive trees are C3 and the replaced native vegetation are C4 plants, moreover, the plants favored by exotic trees are, also, exotic C3 grasses. That means, that there could be more cases in which, both the invasive species and the associated ones are C3 plants that are replacing C4 native ones. Another prediction that quickly make very interested on the relations between invasive species is that climate change is expected to increase climatic variability (topic developed in this institute!), and this environmental change will probably benefit to invasive species, which are frequently benefited by increased disturbance regimes.