Warming Increases the Spread of an Invasive Thistle

Global warming and shifted precipitation regimes increasingly affect species abundances and distributions worldwide. Despite a large literature on species' physiological, phenological, growth, and reproductive responses to such climate change, dispersal is rarely examined. Our study aims to test whether the dispersal ability of a non-native, wind-dispersed plant species is affected by climate change, and to quantify the ramifications for future invasion spread rates.