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Non-native Trees Invading a Rainforest can Change Forest Ecology
Carried out by a research team led by Gregory Asner of the Carnegie Institutions Department of Global Ecology, the study used innovative remote sensing technology on aircraft to survey the impact of invasives on more than 220,000 hectares (850 square miles) of rainforest on the island of Hawaii.
Instruments aboard the Carnegie Airborne Observatory (CAO) penetrated the forest canopy to create a regional CAT scan of the ecosystem, identifying key plant species and mapping the forests three-dimensional structure.
Invasive tree species often show biochemical, physiological, and structural properties that are different from native species, said Asner. We can use these fingerprints combined with the 3-D images to see how the invasives are changing the forest, he added.
Though the undisturbed Hawaiian rainforests are often dominated by the ohia tree, but these slow-growing native trees are losing ground to newcomers, such as the tropical ash and the Canary Island fire tree.
CAO surveys of rainforest tracts on the Mauna Kea and Kilauea Volcanoes found that stands of these two invasive tree species form significantly denser canopies than the native ohia trees.
Less light reaches lower forest levels, and as a result native understory plants such as tree ferns are suppressed.
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