It turns out not all trees are welcome in rain forests, as invading species can render the ecosystems inhospitable for native inhabitants, a new study says.
Recently, scientists surveyed about 850 square miles (about 220,000 hectares) of rain forest on Hawaii's Big Island using remote-sensing devices aboard aircraft.
The instruments infiltrated the forest canopy to produce what looks like a three-dimensional "CAT scan" of the area.
(See a Hawaii map.)
"Our approach identifies species by their often-unique chemical and structural properties, both of which we can map from the air," said study lead author Gregory Asner, an ecologist at the Carnegie Institution of Washington's Department of Global Ecology in Stanford, California.
From the data, Asner and colleagues determined that invasive trees are changing the structure of the Hawaiian rain forest by denying native species valuable resources, such as sunlight.
Winner Takes All
In Hawaii rain forests are generally populated by the slow-growing ohia tree, which produces the red lehua flower.
But surveys of rain forests carpeting the volcanoes Mauna Kea and Kilauea indicate that the native trees are thinning out as invasive trees—such as tropical ash and firetree—encroach on their habitat.
"The particular non-native species that we studied actually change the structure of the rain forest by shading out native species," Asner said.
"Some of the non-native species physically impede the growth of native plants, [for example] by forming an impenetrable barrier at the soil surface that prevents the seedlings of other species to grow," he added.
By altering soil fertility, invasive species can make the environment more attractive to the nearly 120 plant species in Hawaii that are considered highly invasive.
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