Status Updates From Bringing Nature Home: How Y...

But there's the rub. How do we know which ornamental aliens have the capacity to become invasive?..The fact is, it is very difficult to predict..Most of our worst invasives did not become aggressive for many years.Japanese honeysuckle, for example,was planted as an ornamental for 80 years before it escaped cultivation.No one is sure why this lag time occurs.The..responsible course of action is the most unpopular one.

When I compared natives to aliens [plants] in terms of their production of Lepidoptera (butterflies & moths) [whose caterpillars feed on the leaves] and sawfly caterpillars-the largest diet component of insectivorous birds [and what most birds feed to their nestlings]-I found that the native plants in the study supported a whopping 35 times more caterpillar biomass than the aliens..No wonder our birds are struggling.

The first part of this book offers a very enlightening primer on ecology, recent scientific thought on biodiversity & why it matters: it makes ecosystems more resilient --less likely to collapse -- more productive -- of oxygen, plants, animals, water filtration, weather buffering, carbon sequestration etc. -- and less susceptible to takeover by aggressive introduced species (which DT calls alien invaders).