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Beware: alien invasion. Where to next for an understanding of weed ecology?

In this issue of New Phytologist, Dawson et al. (pp. 859–867) take an important step in assessing the role of plant traits, and plasticity therein, in determining invasiveness. They ask whether alien plant species that have larger invasion ranges also have greater plasticity in three functionally important traits: biomass, root ⁄ shoot ratio (R:S ) and specific leaf area (SLA). This approach is novel in that it effectively treats invasiveness as a continuum, rather than a categorical (invasive ⁄ noninvasive) state. In addition it examines plasticity in ecologically significant plant functional traits, which is of interest given the association of these traits with global species distributions (see Wright et al., 2004; Nicotra et al., 2010).