A someone explain to me how a native vs. non-native range is established for a plant? The plant in question is linked in comments. It occurs in all these states, but how is its “native” range inferred?
A someone explain to me how a native vs. non-native range is established for a plant? The plant in question is linked in comments. It occurs in all these states, but how is its “native” range inferred?
Its original native range is in the eastern US, but it has a weedy habit. It colonizes exposed, disturbed soils, and has spread thanks to habitat destruction and soil degradation. That map is based on BONAP’s, which relies on designations from each state, and it’s been declared a noxious weed in much of the south as well as Washington and Connecticut. These states have been lumped into the non-native category in this map, though it was probably native to several of them.
It can be tricky. We have numerous plants in the UK that are naturally occuring but also spread as garden throwouts after sometimes having been popular in cultivation for centuries, and thus short of genetic testing it can become very tricky to separate out the native and non-native ranges.
Some things are easier when the spread has been within the documentary record for things like E. hirsutum which spread along motorways and building sites mainly within the 20th century.
liquidrockss
The whole concept of an invasive plant is ridiculous. Plants have been spread around the globe by humans for thousands of years and every year bird migrations are spreading seeds all around the globe. Trying to take a snapshot of what plants exist in any given region right now this second won’t mean a thing in 100 years as the local environment changes. Nature is in a state constant flux and humans trying to control what grows where is nonsensical. Are soybeans native everywhere theyre being grown? Of course not but nobody cares because there’s a profit involved. To say a plant doesn’t belong anywhere that it can thrive isn’t something for us to decide. If once species is overgrown by another yhat it’s time in that area has simple passed
Jolly_Atmosphere_951
I’m not sure but I hate when they use political borders to map the native range of plants. I just can’t.
encycliatampensis
“Native” or not has no biological meaning. It’s an arbitrary and nebulous term.
There’s a nice chatty description of the methods and collection records used to identify original native ranges as against current dispersed ranges [here at bplant](https://bplant.org/blog/18). Includes this disclaimer:
“These most difficult cases consist of plants either whose native population distributions are already scattered, isolated, or disjoint, or ones that have numerous scattered or isolated native populations around the margins of their range, but extending well outside the regions where they are common. For such a species, when a new population is found which is known not to be fully native, it can be hard to know whether to label it as expanded or introduced.
“When handling such cases, we made a number of arbitrary judgment calls based on a variety of factors including how far out of its original range the new population was, whether or not the two parts of the range are separated by areas the plant probably could not survive in, whether the plant is widely planted in gardens (and thus likely to escape from them), how the plant tends to spread naturally, and whether the plant has weedy or aggressively-spreading tendencies.
“Some of these judgment calls were made hastily and will likely not hold up to scrutiny, so please contact us if you see a designation of a plant as introduced when you think it would make more sense to mark as expanded, or vice-versa, especially if you can provide a source or compelling reasoning explaining why one category makes more sense than the other.”
7 Comments
https://gobotany.nativeplanttrust.org/species/plantago/aristata/
Bracted Plantain – Plantago aristata
Title edit: *can someone*
Its original native range is in the eastern US, but it has a weedy habit. It colonizes exposed, disturbed soils, and has spread thanks to habitat destruction and soil degradation. That map is based on BONAP’s, which relies on designations from each state, and it’s been declared a noxious weed in much of the south as well as Washington and Connecticut. These states have been lumped into the non-native category in this map, though it was probably native to several of them.
FSUS has a better map of its potential native range, though they note that the original distribution’s boundaries are still uncertain:
https://fsus.ncbg.unc.edu/main.php?pg=show-taxon.php&plantname=Plantago+aristata
It can be tricky. We have numerous plants in the UK that are naturally occuring but also spread as garden throwouts after sometimes having been popular in cultivation for centuries, and thus short of genetic testing it can become very tricky to separate out the native and non-native ranges.
Some things are easier when the spread has been within the documentary record for things like E. hirsutum which spread along motorways and building sites mainly within the 20th century.
The whole concept of an invasive plant is ridiculous. Plants have been spread around the globe by humans for thousands of years and every year bird migrations are spreading seeds all around the globe. Trying to take a snapshot of what plants exist in any given region right now this second won’t mean a thing in 100 years as the local environment changes. Nature is in a state constant flux and humans trying to control what grows where is nonsensical. Are soybeans native everywhere theyre being grown? Of course not but nobody cares because there’s a profit involved. To say a plant doesn’t belong anywhere that it can thrive isn’t something for us to decide. If once species is overgrown by another yhat it’s time in that area has simple passed
I’m not sure but I hate when they use political borders to map the native range of plants. I just can’t.
“Native” or not has no biological meaning. It’s an arbitrary and nebulous term.
The herbaria collections linked [here](https://midatlanticherbaria.org/portal/taxa/index.php?taxon=Plantago+aristata&formsubmit=Search+Terms) give you the data for where and when specimens were collected, and you can draw your own heat maps and base your own conclusions from that.
There’s a nice chatty description of the methods and collection records used to identify original native ranges as against current dispersed ranges [here at bplant](https://bplant.org/blog/18). Includes this disclaimer:
“These most difficult cases consist of plants either whose native population distributions are already scattered, isolated, or disjoint, or ones that have numerous scattered or isolated native populations around the margins of their range, but extending well outside the regions where they are common. For such a species, when a new population is found which is known not to be fully native, it can be hard to know whether to label it as expanded or introduced.
“When handling such cases, we made a number of arbitrary judgment calls based on a variety of factors including how far out of its original range the new population was, whether or not the two parts of the range are separated by areas the plant probably could not survive in, whether the plant is widely planted in gardens (and thus likely to escape from them), how the plant tends to spread naturally, and whether the plant has weedy or aggressively-spreading tendencies.
“Some of these judgment calls were made hastily and will likely not hold up to scrutiny, so please contact us if you see a designation of a plant as introduced when you think it would make more sense to mark as expanded, or vice-versa, especially if you can provide a source or compelling reasoning explaining why one category makes more sense than the other.”