Coupling Relationship Between Abiotic Factors, Plant Invasion, and Insect Diversity

Biological invasions are strongly shaped by abiotic environmental filtering, including climatic conditions, soil nutrient availability, hydrological processes, land-use regimes, and diverse forms of disturbance. These same drivers also play a major role in structuring insect communities by influencing species richness, community composition, phenological dynamics, and trophic interactions. Invasive plants may affect insects directly through changes in host resources and habitat structure, and indirectly through alterations in microclimatic conditions, food-web relationships, and ecosystem processes. However, abiotic factors, plant invasion, and insect diversity are still often investigated separately, which limits our ability to predict ecological responses and to develop scientifically robust management strategies under rapid environmental change.

This Research Topic aims to provide an integrated understanding of how abiotic environmental conditions jointly shape plant invasion processes and patterns of insect diversity, while also examining how invasive plants feed back on insect communities and ecosystem functioning. We welcome studies that address these mechanisms across environmental gradients, disturbance regimes, and habitat types, with particular attention to the ecological roles of insects in resisting invasion, facilitating invasion, or mediating invasion outcomes. By bringing together field surveys, controlled experiments, long-term monitoring, synthetic analyses, and modeling approaches, this collection seeks to strengthen predictive capacity in invasion ecology, advance biodiversity conservation, and support evidence-based invasion management and ecological decision-making.

This Research Topic welcomes original research on, but not limited to, the following themes: the effects of climate warming, drought, nutrient enrichment, environmental pollution, hydrological change, fire disturbance, and land-use change on plant invasions and insect communities; the impacts of invasive plants on herbivores, pollinators, predators, parasitoids, decomposers, and food-web structure; insect-mediated biotic resistance and facilitation; studies based on functional traits, phylogenetic relationships, ecological networks, and community assembly theory; case studies from terrestrial, freshwater, wetland, agricultural, and urban ecosystems; and implications for monitoring and early warning, ecological restoration, risk assessment, and adaptive management. Studies employing experimental approaches, molecular ecological methods, remote sensing, and modeling frameworks are particularly encouraged.

Article types and fees

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Data Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• Mini Review
• Opinion
• ... View all formats

Articles that are accepted for publication by our external editors following rigorous peer review incur a publishing fee charged to Authors, institutions, or funders.

Article types

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Data Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• Mini Review
• Opinion
• Original Research
• Perspective
• Policy and Practice Reviews
• Policy Brief
• Registered Report
• Review
• Systematic Review
• Technology and Code

Keywords: abiotic factors; plant invasion; insect diversity; community assembly; multitrophic interactions; global change

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.