Biological invasions threaten global biodiversity and natural resources. Anticipating future invasions is central to strategies for combating the spread of invasive species. Ecological niche models are thus increasingly used to predict potential distribution of invasive species. In this study, we compare ecological niches of Rhododendron ponticum in its native (Iberian Peninsula) and invasive (Britain) ranges. Here, we test the conservation of ecological niche between invasive and native populations of R. ponticum using principal component analysis, niche dynamics analysis, and MaxEnt-based reciprocal niche modeling. We show that niche overlap between native and invasive populations is very low, leading us to the conclusion that the two niches are not equivalent and are dissimilar. We conclude that R. ponticum occupies novel environmental conditions in Britain. However, the evidence of niche shift presented in this study should be treated with caution because of nonanalogue climatic conditions between native and invasive ranges and a small population size in the native range. We then frame our results in the context of contradicting genetic evidence on possible hybridization of this invasive species in Britain. We argue that the existing contradictory studies on whether hybridization caused niche shift in R. ponticum are not sufficient to prove or disprove this hypothesis. However, we present a series of theoretical arguments which indicate that hybridization is a likely cause of the observed niche expansion of R. ponticum in Britain.

Department of Botany Ecology Unit University of Ibadan Ibadan Nigeria

Department of Forestry and Range Management FAS and T Bahauddin Zakariya University Multan Multan Pakistan

Department of Geography and Environmental Science University of Reading Reading UK

Faculty of Forestry and Wood Sciences Czech University of Life Sciences Prague Czech Republic

Laboratorio de Macroecología Evolutiva Red de Biología Evolutiva Instituto de Ecología A C Veracruz México

School of Agriculture Policy and Development University of Reading Reading UK

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