Ornamental plants are a major component of any outdoor landscape. Adding diversity to the current…
The structure of many plant communities in the Hawai’ian Islands has been altered to the point where they may never again resemble their original state. This is facilitated by the frequent inability of native Hawaiʻian plants to naturally recolonize degraded habitats when faced with competition from more vigorous alien invaders; as a result, many natives are on track to extinction. Very little is known about how environmental filtering, biogeographical origins, and functional traits of native and non-native plants species affects native cover in the long-term. Plots 20x20m will be established in previously surveyed twenty-five to fifty-eight year ago in mixed native/non-native dry and wet forest plots on Oʻahu, Hawai’i in order to determine how natives have fared over time, and the relative importance of native/non-native functional and biogeographical diversity along an abiotic gradient for determining native cover and persistence.