In 1860, a British expedition attacked the forests of the highlands of South America, in search of a star product: cinchona seeds. The bark of those “feverish” trees produces quinine, an antimalarial compound, and the British Empire sought a solid source of medicine for its civil service in India. After being cultivated in the United Kingdom, the young cinchonas were planted in southern India and present-day Sri Lanka.
Britain’s quinine program failed; instead, a species brought to Java, now part of Indonesia, through the Dutch Empire and then ruled the global market, however, cinchona trees are still not unusual in parts of India.
These botanical legacies of the imperial government are common, according to a paper published Oct. 17 in Nature Ecology.
The link between European colonialism and invasive species is intuitive and has been pointed out by other researchers, says Bernd Lenzner, a macroecologist at the University of Vienna who led the study. To verify the association, his team turned to the Global Naturalized Alien Flora database, which maps the distribution of nearly 14,000 invasive plant species.
In more than 1100 regions, adding 404 islands, the researchers found that regions once occupied by the British Empire had more similarities in their invasive flora than the “synthetic” empires the team assembled from random regions. This is also the case for regions that were once a component of the Dutch Empire (former Spanish and Portuguese colonies had exotic plant compositions similar to those of synthetic empires).
Climate and geography play a role in explaining the overlap in invasive species diversity, according to Lenzner’s team’s model, but so does the length of time regions have been occupied by imperial power. Regions that were at the center of trade, such as South India for the British Empire and Indonesia for the Dutch Empire, formed clusters with abundant overlap in invasive plant composition.
The research did not read when individual plant species were brought in or why. But for the record, many of the plants transported in the ancient empires once came at an economical price and their populations were likely established on purpose, Lenzner says.
The study’s findings may be “super obvious,” but they have vital implications for conservation, says Nussaïbah Raja, a paleontologist at Friedrich-Alexander University of Erlangen-Nürnberg in Erlangen, Germany. Raja adds that appreciating the history of plants brought, as well as their position in current ecosystems, can help conservationists manage long-term adjustments in biodiversity, such as those brought about by climate change.
Global industry is beginning to undermine the colonial legacy of brought plants. For example, the research showed similarities between invasive plant populations in Fujian, China, and parts of Australia. The global industry may also be partly to blame for the overlap.
“We still see those traces of the legacy of colonial empire centuries ago,” Lenzner says. “So what we do and the money we redistribute will be visual in the future. “
doi: https://doi. org/10. 1038/d41586-022-03306-2
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