Celebration of Learning

Do Stands of Native Trees Harbor Different Invasive Species Than Stands of Planted Pine?

The most outstanding invasive species that can be found at Augustana’s Green Wing Environmental Laboratory are honeysuckle, buckthorn, multiflora rose, garlic mustard, autumn olive, and oriental bittersweet. These plants are not only disrupting the ecosystem at Green Wing, but they are doing it all over the country. The result of their disruption is that they have taken over entire habitats and left natural species with no way to compete for survival. To study this we used the line-point method as well as other forms of data collection to compare a non-native pine tree habitat to an area dominated by native trees. We repeated the line-point method ten times in each ecosystem, which gave us 1,600 total data points. Following our analysis, we could conclude that there were significantly more invasive species in the top canopies than native species, and there were more invasive species in the lower canopy of the area dominated by native trees in comparison to the lower canopy of the non-native pine ecosystem