Forestry activity is one mechanism of invasion by arboreal plants

Abstract

For a long time, forestry primarily had industrial goals. Volume of wood production was the main criterion of forestry efficacy, and thus rapid-growing arboreal species were cultivated in natural forests. More recently, nature protection has become one of forestry's goals. Unfortunately, some introduced, rapid-growing species became aggressive components of natural ecological systems during the interim. In this paper, we first describe a method that we developed to categorize aggressiveness of invasive arboreal plants in natural forest ecosystems of Kazakhstan. We then apply this new scheme to monitoring data of invasive arboreal plants to provide an insight into the invasion potential of different species in the fruit forests of Southeast Kazakhstan. © 2013 Science Press, Xinjiang Institute of Ecology and Geography, Chinese Academy of Sciences and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.