Aim: Many studies show that increase in ground-level ozone (O₃) has adverse effects on plant growth. Due to high phenotypic plasticity, invasive species is considered to be more adaptable to elevated O3 than native species. This idea is only tested by the very limited studies comparing invasive weeds with crops. However, whether it holds remains unclear when comparing invasive species with their co-occurring native species in natural systems.

Location: China

Methods: We performed an open-top chamber experiment growing six congeneric pairs of invasive and native species with and without competition under ambient (approximately 43 ppb) and elevated O₃ (approximately 89 ppb) concentrations to test whether the growth responses to elevated O₃ concentrations differ between invasive and native species.

Results: Our results revealed that elevated O₃ had a significant negative effect on both invasive and native species. In particular, elevated O₃ reduced the aboveground biomass and damaged the leaves of invasive species significantly more than those of native species.

Main conclusions: Our study indicates that elevated O₃ concentration has a stronger adverse effect on invasive species than on native species. Therefore, increasing O₃ pollution might suppress plant invasion, and thus invasive species might expand their distribution more easily to the area with lower O₃ pollution in the future.

All data were collected from this experiment.

The terms of 'NA' in the dataset represents the missing values. Two pots of plants experienced drought in the experiment, which were also indicated in the dataset (see the 'Note' column). The unit of biomass is gram. The unit of height is centimeter. Regarding any question on the data, please contact Dr. Yan Li (yan.li@uni-konstanz.de) or Dr. Yanjie Liu (liuyanjie@iga.ac.cn).