Regional and local factors interact to shape colonization and extinction dynamics of invasive Hydrilla verticillata in a patchy landscape

Understanding the response of species to global change requires disentangling the drivers of their distributions across landscapes. Colonization and extinction processes, shaped by the interplay of landscape-level and local patch-level factors, are key determinants of these distributions. However, disentangling the influence of these factors, when larger-scale processes manifest at local scales, remains a challenge. We addressed this challenge by investigating the colonization and extinction dynamics of the aquatic plant, Hydrilla verticillata, in a complex riverine rock pool system. This system, with hundreds of rock pools experiencing varying flooding frequencies, provided a natural laboratory to examine how a single landscape-level disturbance can differentially impact colonization and extinction depending on local patch characteristics to shape species distributions. Using five years of data across over 500 sites and more than 5,000 surveys, we employed dynamic occupancy models to m..., , Excel and R are required to open the data files included in this submission.,