There is a complex interaction between biological invasions and global environmental change. Biological invasions are not only passengers of global change, but can also be major drivers of global change (MacDougall and Turkington 2005). Other components of global change, such as atmospheric CO₂ enrichment, global warming, nitrogen deposition, changes in precipitation regimes, habitat fragmentation and land-use change, affect species distributions and resource dynamics of ecosystems, and consequently drive invasion success of many exotic species. On the other hand, invasion by exotic species can also alter basic ecosystem properties, which in turn affect many components of global change. Research on the patterns, processes and mechanisms of biological invasion can shed light on the drivers and consequences of biological invasions in the light of global change, and serve as a scientific basis for forward-thinking management plans. The overarching challenge is to understand the basic ecological interactions of, e.g., invasive and native species, plants and soil, and plants and animals.

China is one of the countries in the world i.e. seriously affected by biological invasions of exotic species. According to the Bulletin on China’s Ecological Environment in 2019, there are more than 660 invasive alien species in China, 215 alien species have invaded national nature reserves, and 71 of the species have caused and/or potentially cause threats to natural ecosystems. In response, the Chinese Government formulated the Biosecurity Law of the People’s Republic of China in 2020, which has been effective since 15 April 2021. The National Natural Science Foundation of China, the Ministry of Science and Technology of the People’s Republic of China and other government departments have funded many projects related to biological invasions each year, and consequently China has become a major player in research on biological invasions worldwide.

The Ecological Society of China has established the professional committee of biological invasion ecology, aiming to strengthen the exchange and cooperation among scientists in the related fields, and to promote the development of invasion ecology and to apply the research outcomes in the management of invasive species. The committee has sponsored the International Conference on Biological Invasion and Global Change for four times, and the 4th International Conference was held in Zhenjiang, Jiangsu Province, East China, from 16 to 19 November 2020. During the preparations of the conference, we discussed the possibility to publish a special issue on biological invasion in the Journal of Plant Ecology, and we are very pleased that we got the permission to do so from Prof. Wen-Hao Zhang, the editor-in-chief of Journal of Plant Ecology.

We solicited 34 manuscripts in total for the special issue, and, after peer reviewing by experts, 20 of them have finally been accepted and included in the special issue. These 20 papers cover a wide range of spatial extents, from laboratory to the global scale, multiple methodologies, from laboratory and/or field experiments to modelling, and various research themes, including the patterns, processes, impacts and mechanisms of biological invasions. Eight papers on invasions also address other topics of global change, such as global warming, nitrogen deposition, atmospheric CO₂ enrichment, rainfall variation and environmental pollutant (Fig. 1; Hu et al. 2022; Li et al. 2022a, 2022b; Liu et al. 2022a, 2022b; Lu et al. 2022a, 2022b; Yu et al. 2022). Five papers address biogeographic patterns (Binama and Müller 2022; Li et al. 2022c; Liu et al. 2022b; Yuan et al. 2022; Zhang et al. 2022). Eight papers deal with the effects of other biota on biological invasions, e.g. herbivores and soil microbes, including arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (Chen et al. 2022; Huang et al. 2022; Kong et al. 2022; Li et al. 2022c; Liu et al. 2022a, 2022b; Lu et al. 2022a; Yuan et al. 2022). Five papers report on differences between invasive and native plant species (Huang et al. 2022; Liu et al. 2022a; Lu et al. 2022a, 2022b; Yu et al. 2022). Three papers address the impacts of exotic plant species (Hu et al. 2022; Sun et al. 2022a, 2022b). Two papers focus on clonal integration of invasive plants (Pu et al. 2022; Qi et al. 2022), and two consider native plant diversity or relative abundance of invasive species (Pu et al. 2022; Xue et al. 2022). Several of those papers focus on multiple of the topics mentioned above. For example, three of the papers each address three of the topics mentioned above (Liu et al. 2022a, 2022b; Lu et al. 2022a).

Figure 1:

The six main topics (circles with blue background) and the papers (circle with yellow background) associated with them in this special issue.

Figure 1:

The six main topics (circles with blue background) and the papers (circle with yellow background) associated with them in this special issue.

We are grateful to the editorial team of Journal of Plant Ecology, particularly to Wen-Hao Zhang, Bernhard Schmid and Li-Juan Liu, for giving us the opportunity to organize this special issue. The publication of this special issue would not have been possible without their support. We are also grateful to the authors of the manuscripts, both the accepted and rejected ones. We sincerely hope that this special issue will advance our mechanistic understanding of biological invasions under global change. We also hope that it will encourage more people and organizations to pay attention to the issue of biological invasions, and that it will contribute to improvement of the management of invasive alien species. Last but not least, we hope that this special issue will increase the readership of the journal, and that more people will participate in the successive conference.