In the Community of Madrid area, in Spain, there can be found a number of invasive plants that have become household presences in the local flora. Species such as Acacia dealbata, Lonicera japonica, Eucalyptus, Vinca difformis, and Lantana camara have rapidly naturalized. These plants can be thought of as the vegetal counterpart of a series of human migrations that have been introduced to the European continent in the last quarter century, many of them from the Americas. Migrations of plants and animals, less notorious and longer in span, are of a very different nature than those of humans: the latter arrive hastily to set foot upon a strange, possibly more fertile land, adapting silently to the conditions of their new environment. They settle into the clefts, find fissures where they introduce themselves with difficulty, and are sometimes subject to the way of life natives impose. In this sense, human migrants are survivors. Migrations of plants and animals, on the contrary, appropriate the foreign environment, rapidly modifying their growth patterns according to the soil conditions, profiting from the weaknesses of native species. [...]
Invasive Species
in ENCYCLOPEDIA