Density dependence in invasive plants: Demography, herbivory, spread and evolution

Because of their environmental and economic costs (Pimentel et al, 2000), some invasive plant species are well studied over relatively long time scales (Buckley et al, 2003a) and in different habitats (Paynter et al, 2003). These data are valuable for the development or testing of general theoretical models of population dynamics and species interactions. Furthermore, knowing the kind of dynamics exhibited by invasives matters if we are attempting to predict their impact on an ecosystem, and to anticipate how they will respond to novel environments over ecological and evolutionary time-scales. General recent reviews of density dependence can be found in: Turchin (1999), Krebs (2002), Sibly and Hone (2002); here, we concentrate on how recent advances in our understanding of how density dependent processes contribute to our understanding of the demography, management and evolution of invasive plant species.