Beyond Initial Growth: A Better Way to Predict Invasive Success

What is it about?

When a new species enters an ecosystem—whether it is a weed in a field, a probiotic in the gut, or a new genetic mutation—its fate depends on more than how fast it grows at the beginning. Traditional approaches focus on this early growth, known as naive invasion fitness, but often fail because they ignore how the invader reshapes the community it enters. This paper introduces dressed invasion fitness, a framework that captures the full feedback between an invader and its environment. As a species becomes more common, it changes resource availability and interactions among other species, which in turn affects its own success. By accounting for this two-way feedback, dressed invasion fitness accurately predicts long-term outcomes, including which species persist, which go extinct, and how abundant each becomes. The theory applies across a wide range of ecosystems, from plant communities to microbial populations.

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Photo by Ian on Unsplash

Photo by Ian on Unsplash

Why is it important?

By incorporating ecological feedbacks, this work reveals clear and general patterns in invasion outcomes. In particular, it shows that invasions most often drive rare, low-abundance species to extinction, while closely related species—such as a mutant and its parent strain—frequently coexist. This improves our ability to identify vulnerable species, manage invasive organisms, and design beneficial communities in settings like agriculture and human health. More broadly, the framework demonstrates that very different ecosystems follow the same underlying rules, allowing researchers to make reliable predictions without tracking every individual interaction.

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