Predictive mapping to identify refuges for plant communities threatened by earthworm invasion

1. Biological invasions by cryptic ecosystem engineers can alter the ecological and socio-economic values of ecosystems in ways that may take decades to detect. The invasion of North American glacial refuges by non-native earthworms offers a prominent but understudied example of a cryptic invasion. Non-native earthworms are known to alter carbon sequestration, disrupt mycorrhizal networks, and homogenize plant communities, but natural resource managers still lack robust protocols to identify and safeguard high conservation value communities (HCVCs) from such invasions. In the absence of such protocols, or reliable methods to eradicate non-native earthworm populations once established, there is an urgent need for methods to identify HCVCs at risk of or potentially shielded from earthworm invasion by the existence of abiotic barriers to their dispersal or persistence in such sites.

2. We developed species distribution models (SDMs) using in-situ field surveys and remotely sensed data t...