APPROACHES TO NATIVE AND ALIEN SPECIES

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FUTURE FLORA

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APPROACHES TO NATIVE AND ALIEN SPECIES C. D. PRESTON Most botanists are aware of the apparently increasing number of alien species naturalised in Britain. Whereas it was commonplace twenty years ago to hear vice-county recorders expressing the view that their real job was to record the native flora, and that this left little time to spare for aliens, this is now very much a minority opinion. Stace’s New Flora of the British Isles (1991) did much to stimulate this interest in alien plants. Stace reviewed the plants which are currently naturalised or occur as frequent casuals, his criteria for inclusion in the New Flora, and as a result brought to the attention of British botanists many taxa which had not hitherto been included in Floras. Taxa which were added as a result of this work are discussed in Professor Stace’s contribution to this conference. (Stace, 2002) My intention in this paper is not to review the changing alien flora as such, but to examine the attitudes of botanists and conservationists to these alien species. How rapidly did the early botanists come to recognise the alien component in our flora? How have their successors classified this heterogeneous group of plants? And is the alien component of our biodiversity regarded as a threat to the native plants? Definitions Some of the controversy which surrounds the subject of native species arises from uncertainty about definitions, or the differing definitions of different authors. The following definitions are based on those of Macpherson et al. (1996): A native plant is one which arrived in the study area without intervention by man, whether intentional or unintentional, having come from an area in which it is native or one which has arisen de novo in the study area. An alien plant is one which was brought to the study area by man, intentionally or unintentionally, even if native to the source area or one which has come into the area without man’s intervention, but from an area in which it is alien. Two important points follow from these definitions. Native and alien species differ in their means of arrival, not their time of arrival. Although many native species arrived thousands of years ago, it is still possible for native species to colonise Britain by natural means of dispersal such as birds, sea currents or the wind. A species which has been introduced by man is defined by its means of introduction as an alien. One of the most frequent questions – how long does an alien species have to be established before it becomes a native? – is therefore based on a misapprehension. A species remains an alien however long it survives. The second point to make is that the term native and alien are descriptions of the means of arrival of species, not value judgements. When Trevor Dines, David Pearman and I assessed the status of plants to be included in the New Atlas of the British and Irish Flora we were sometimes accused of ‘demoting’

Trans. Suffolk Nat. Soc. 38 (2002)


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