Data from: Invasive alien plants benefit more from clonal integration in heterogeneous environments than natives

What confers invasive alien plants a competitive advantage over native plants remains open to debate. Many of the world's worst invasive alien plants are clonal and able to share resources within clones (clonal integration), particularly in heterogeneous environments. Here, we tested the hypothesis that clonal integration benefits invasive clonal plants more than natives and thus confers invasives a competitive advantage.
We selected five congeneric and naturally co-occurring pairs of invasive alien and native clonal plants in China, and grew pairs of connected and disconnected ramets under heterogeneous light, soil nutrient and water conditions that are commonly encountered by alien plants during their invasion into new areas.
Clonal integration increased biomass of all plants in all three heterogeneous resource environments. However, invasive plants benefited more from clonal integration than natives. Consequently, invasive plants produced more biomass than natives.
Our results indicate that clonal integration may confer invasive alien clonal plants a competitive advantage over natives. Therefore, differences in the ability of clonal integration could potentially explain, at least partly, the invasion success of alien clonal plants in areas where resources are heterogeneously distributed.

外来入侵植物何以相较本土植物具备竞争优势，这一议题至今仍存争议。全球范围内危害最为突出的外来入侵植物多为克隆植物，且可在克隆株系内部共享资源（克隆整合，clonal integration），该能力在异质环境中尤为关键。本研究旨在验证如下假说：克隆整合对外来入侵克隆植物的增益效果优于本土克隆植物，从而赋予入侵植物竞争优势。
我们在中国境内选取了5对同属且自然伴生的外来入侵克隆植物与本土克隆植物，分别设置相连与断开的分株对，在异质光照、土壤养分与水分条件下开展栽培实验——此类资源异质性环境正是外来植物入侵新区域时的典型遭遇环境。
在三种异质资源环境中，克隆整合均提升了所有供试植物的生物量。但相较本土植物，外来入侵植物从克隆整合中获得的增益更为显著，最终入侵植物的生物量亦高于本土植物。
本研究结果表明，克隆整合或可赋予外来入侵克隆植物相较于本土植物的竞争优势。因此，克隆整合能力的差异，至少可部分解释异质资源分布区域中外来克隆植物的入侵成功机制。