Human activities continue to facilitate biological invasions, profoundly impacting our environment and economy. Plants and insects constitute the majority of invasions to date, with facilitative links established between them, particularly in terrestrial habitats. These relationships remain understudied in aquatic environments, including potential associations between aquatic invasive plants and disease vectors such as mosquitoes. Here, we synthesize current knowledge on the co-occurrence of aquatic invasive plants and mosquitoes, identify key research gaps, and present a conceptual framework underpinned by testable hypotheses on how aquatic invasive plants may influence immature and adult mosquito populations. We provide evidence suggesting that these plant-mosquito relationships could pose previously unrecognized risks and highlight priority areas for future research to better understand the potential public health implications of aquatic plant invasions. We call for targeted in situ and ex situ investigations to test the proposed hypotheses and increase our understanding on the interactions between aquatic invasive plants and mosquito population dynamics. Testing these hypotheses will inform adaptive, evidence-based management strategies to simultaneously control aquatic invasive species and vector mosquitoes.

There is widespread concern that cessation of grazing in historically grazed ecosystems is causing biotic homogenization and biodiversity loss. Here, we used 12 montane grassland sites along an 800-km north-south gradient across the United Kingdom, to test whether cessation of grazing affects local ɑ- and β-diversity of belowground food webs. We show that cessation of grazing leads to strongly decreased ɑ-diversity of both soil microbial and faunal diversity. In contrast, the β-diversity varied between groups of soil organisms. While soil microbial communities exhibited increased homogenization after cessation of grazing, we observed decreased homogenization for soil fauna after cessation of grazing. Overall, our results indicate that grazer exclusion from historically grazed montane grasslands has far-ranging consequences for the diversity and composition of belowground food webs, and underscore the importance of grazers for maintaining the diversity of belowground communities, which play a central role in ecosystem functioning.