Invasion characteristics and influencing factors of Solidago canadensis in leisure-tourism villages in the south of the Yangtze River

Invasive plants pose a serious threat to plant diversity in rural areas, weaken their ecosystem service functions, and have become a prominent issue that urgently needs to be addressed in rural revitalization and beautiful rural construction. In this study, based on survey data from 127 sampling sites, we aimed to explore the degree of invasion and influencing factors of the invasive plant Solidago canadensis in a leisure-tourism village located in south of the Yangtze River. The height of S. canadensis showed a normal distribution, whereas its coverage showed a significantly positively skewed distribution. In rural areas, it displayed a multipoint scattered distribution pattern, forming a single optimal community locally and exhibiting a trend of further potential dispersal. We also found that the height and coverage of S. canadensis were significantly affected by various factors in rural environments. Specifically, the height of S. canadensis was negatively correlated with the species number and coverage of native plant species in the community, in which the number of native plant species played a more important role. In contrast, the coverage of S. canadensis showed a decreasing trend with increasing distance from the farmland, and the species number and coverage of native plant species. The interaction between the number of native plant species and coverage significantly suppressed the coverage of S. canadensis, and the inhibitory effect of native plant coverage on the coverage of S. canadensis increased with the increase in the number of native plant species in the rural community. In conclusion, leisure-tourism villages have been severely affected by the invasion and spread of S. canadensis. This study also identified the fundamental role of multiple community attributes of native plant species in resisting the invasiveness of single alien plant species and broadened our current understanding of the invasion mechanism of single invasive plants in rural landscapes. These findings emphasize the urgent need to incorporate the monitoring and prevention of invasive plant species into rural ecological landscape planning for the development of leisure tourism in the future, thus providing a solid scientific basis for the comprehensive prevention and control of invasive plants in different rural areas and the maintenance of rural biodiversity during the construction of beautiful rural areas.