ORIGINAL PAPER The potential invasiveness of an aquatic macrophyte reflects founder effects from native niche Luiz Guilherme dos Santos Ribas . Cibele de Ca ´ssia-Silva . Danielle Katharine Petsch . Ma ´rcio Jose ´ Silveira . Matheus Souza Lima-Ribeiro Received: 22 June 2017 / Accepted: 6 June 2018 Ó Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature 2018 Abstract Biological invasions are important drivers of biodiversity loss. Hence, predicting invasion risks considering the invasion history of a species might help drive meaningful conservation strategies. We investigated the niche dynamics occurring during the invasion of Hydrilla verticillata in North and South America. Because of founder effects, we hypothesised that occupied invaded area niches across North and South American are a subset of the occupied niche in the native range. Moreover, according to the invasion history, we expected that the South American niche is more similar to the North American one than the native niche. We built ecological niche models to predict the potential distribution of hydrilla from native and invaded occurrence records, as well as analysing niche overlap, equivalency, and similarity between the native and two invaded areas. Although the models predicted spatially congruent suitable sites, the ones based on native occurrence records predicted larger geographical ranges for hydrilla across South America than those based on the records of its North American invasions. The environmental conditions the species occupied in both invaded areas are modestly overlapped with the native area (Schoener’s Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s10530-018-1780-6) con- tains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. L. G. S. Ribas Á C. de Ca ´ssia-Silva Á D. K. Petsch Á M. S. Lima-Ribeiro Programa de Po ´s-graduac ¸a ˜o em Ecologia e Evoluc ¸a ˜o, Universidade Federal de Goia ´s, Goia ˆnia, GO 74001-970, Brazil L. G. S. Ribas (&) Á D. K. Petsch Laborato ´rio de Ecologia Teo ´rica e Sı ´ntese, Departamento de Ecologia, Universidade Federal de Goia ´s, Goia ˆnia, GO 74001-970, Brazil e-mail: lg_ribas@hotmail.com C. de Ca ´ssia-Silva Laborato ´rio de Gene ´tica and Biodiversidade, Instituto de Cie ˆncias Biolo ´gicas, Universidade Federal de Goia ´s, Goia ˆnia, GO 74001-970, Brazil M. J. Silveira Nu ´cleo de Pesquisa em Limnologia, Ictiologia e Aqu ¨icultura (Nupe ´lia), Universidade Estadual de Maringa ´, Maringa ´, PR 87020-900, Brazil M. S. Lima-Ribeiro Laborato ´rio de Macroecologia. Instituto de Biocie ˆncias, Universidade Federal de Goia ´s, Jataı ´, GO 75804-020, Brazil 123 Biol Invasions https://doi.org/10.1007/s10530-018-1780-6