Increases and fluctuations in nutrient availability do not promote dominance of alien plants in synthetic communities of common natives

1. It is frequently thought that global environmental changes, and especially the concomitant changes in environmental variability, could further increase the success of invasive species in native resident communities. However, very few studies explicitly tested this, and it remains unknown whether invasive and non-invasive alien species respond differently to resource fluctuations in resident communities.

2. We grew ten invasive and ten non-invasive species as target species in pot-mesocosms with four different synthetic native resident communities under six nutrient treatments differing in overall nutrient availability and temporal fluctuations in nutrient supply (constant low, constant high, gradual increasing, gradual decreasing, single large pulse, multiple smaller pulses). With the exception of plants in the constant low treatment, the plants were supplied the same total amount of nutrients during the experiment. We tested whether high nutrient availability and fluctuations in ...