Data from: Invasive herbaceous respond more negatively to elevated ozone concentration than native species

Aim: Many studies show that increase in ground-level ozone (O3) has
adverse effects on plant growth. Due to high phenotypic plasticity,
invasive species is considered to be more adaptable to elevated O3 than
native species. This idea is only tested by the very limited studies
comparing invasive weeds with crops. However, whether it holds remains
unclear when comparing invasive species with their co-occurring native
species in natural systems. Location: China Methods: We performed an
open-top chamber experiment growing six congeneric pairs of invasive and
native species with and without competition under ambient (approximately
43 ppb) and elevated O3 (approximately 89 ppb) concentrations to test
whether the growth responses to elevated O3 concentrations differ between
invasive and native species. Results: Our results revealed that elevated
O3 had a significant negative effect on both invasive and native species.
In particular, elevated O3 reduced the aboveground biomass and damaged the
leaves of invasive species significantly more than those of native
species. Main conclusions: Our study indicates that elevated O3
concentration has a stronger adverse effect on invasive species than on
native species. Therefore, increasing O3 pollution might suppress plant
invasion, and thus invasive species might expand their distribution more
easily to the area with lower O3 pollution in the future.