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Despite the ubiquity of introduced species, their long-term impacts on native plant abundance and diversity remain poorly understood. Coexistence theory offers a tool for advancing this understanding by providing a framework to link short-term individual measurements with long-term population dynamics by directly quantifying the niche and average fitness differences between species. We observed that a pair of closely related and functionally similar annual plants with different origins—native  Plectritis congesta  and introduced  Valerianella locusta —co-occur at the community scale but rarely at the local scale of direct interaction. To test whether niche and/or fitness differences preclude local-scale long-term coexistence, we parameterized models of competitor dynamics with results from a controlled outdoor pot experiment, where we manipulated densities of each species. To evaluate the hypothesis that niche and fitness differences exhibit environmental dependency, leading to community-scale coexistence despite local competitive exclusion, we replicated this experiment with a water availability treatment to determine if this key limiting resource alters the long-term prediction. Water availability impacted population vital rates and intensities of intraspecific versus interspecific competition between  P. congesta  and  V. locusta . Despite environmental influence on competition our model predicts that native  P. congesta  competitively excludes introduced  V. locusta  in direct competition across water availability conditions because of an absence of stabilizing niche differences combined with a difference in average fitness, although this advantage weakens in drier conditions. Further, field data demonstrated that  P. congesta  densities have a negative effect on  V. locusta  seed prediction. We conclude that native  P. congesta  limits abundances of introduced  V. locusta  at the direct-interaction scale, and we posit that  V. locusta  may rely on spatially dependent coexistence mechanisms to maintain coexistence at the site scale. In quantifying this competitive outcome our study demonstrates mechanistically how a native species may limit the abundance of an introduced invader.

A native annual forb locally excludes a closely related introduced species that co-occurs in oak-savanna habitat remnants