Abstract

Roadsides are major pathways of plant invasions in mountain regions. However, the increasing importance of tourism may also turn hiking trails into conduits of non-native plant spread to remote mountain landscapes. Here, we evaluated the importance of such trails for plant invasion in five protected mountain areas of southern central Chile. We therefore sampled native and non-native species along 17 trails and in the adjacent undisturbed vegetation. We analyzed whether the number and cover of non-native species in local plant assemblages is related to distance to trail and a number of additional variables that characterize the abiotic and biotic environment as well as the usage of the trail. We found that non-native species at higher elevations are a subset of the lowland source pool and that their number and cover decreases with increasing elevation and with distance to trails, although this latter variable only explained 4–8% of the variation in the data. In addition, non-native richness and cover were positively correlated with signs of livestock presence but negatively with the presence of intact forest vegetation. These results suggest that, at least in the region studied, hiking trails have indeed fostered non-native species spread to higher elevations, although less efficiently than roadsides. As a corollary, appropriate planning and management of trails could become increasingly important to control plant invasions into mountains in a world which is warming and where visitation and recreational use of mountainous areas is expected to increase.

中文翻译：

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登山步道是非本地物种在山区传播的管道

摘要

路边是山区植物入侵的主要途径。然而，旅游业的重要性日益提高，也可能将远足径变成非本地植物传播到偏远山区景观的渠道。在这里，我们评估了智利中南部五个受保护山区的此类小径对于植物入侵的重要性。因此，我们沿17条小径以及附近未受干扰的植被采样了本地和非本地物种。我们分析了本地植物组合中非本地物种的数量和覆盖范围是否与到步道的距离以及表征非生物和生物环境以及步道的使用的其他变量有关。我们发现，海拔较高的非本地物种是低地源库的一个子集，并且其数量和覆盖范围随海拔的升高和与步道的距离的增加而减少，尽管后一个变量仅解释了数据变化的4–8％ 。此外，非本地的丰富度和覆盖度与牲畜存在的迹象呈正相关，而与完整森林植被的存在呈负相关。这些结果表明，至少在所研究的地区，远足径确实促进了非本地物种向更高海拔的扩散，尽管效率不如路边。作为必然，