Climate change induced range-expanding plants : aboveground and belowground interactions

Burning of fossil fuels has raised the level of atmospheric carbon dioxide, which contributes to global climate warming. As a result the mean earth surface temperature has increased faster in the past decades than in the previous thousands of years before. This rapid climate warming together with habitat fragmentation and other land use changes puts a major pressure on many plants and animals. They should either adapt to the warmer climate conditions or disperse in order to keep up with their optimal climatic conditions. Range expansion brings new interactions within the ecosystem in the new range. This can lead to potential benefits, for example range shifting species that do not encounter natural enemies in the new range might become invasive. Although invasive species are a well-studied phenomenon, there is relatively little known about the general mechanisms of biological invasions under climate change. In this thesis I focus on plant species that expand range due to current climate warming. I examined how these range-expanding plants interact with aboveground herbivorous insects and - mostly - how they establish belowground interactions with components of the soil food web. I examined how these interactions in the new range may play a role in the successful establishment of climate change induced range-expanding plants in plant communities of the new range. The focus of my study was on riverine (riparian) areas along the great rivers in the Netherlands, which are well connected with southern Europe by the Rhine and Rhine-Danube canal. In the first experiment we examined exotic plant exposure to aboveground and belowground enemies. We used plants that originated from Eurasia (intra-continental range expanders) and plants that originated from other continents (inter-continental range expanders). We compared these exotic plants with phylogenetically related natives. We grew the plants with and without non-coevolved polyphagous (generalist) herbivores, a locust Sch