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Quantifying the impacts of alien species: towards an IUCN Black List

One of the major transformations of the planet from human activities is the wholesale redistribution of species, through the deliberate or accidental translocation of their populations to areas outside their native range. These “alien” species have in many cases caused substantial deleterious impacts to the recipient environment (e.g. extinctions of native populations and species, the disruption of soil nutrient and water cycling, and natural disturbance regimes). Preventing and mitigating such impacts is a major drain on limited conservation resources.

One of the major transformations of the planet from human activities is the wholesale redistribution of species, through the deliberate or accidental translocation of their populations to areas outside their native range. These “alien” species have in many cases caused substantial deleterious impacts to the recipient environment (e.g. extinctions of native populations and species, the disruption of soil nutrient and water cycling, and natural disturbance regimes). Preventing and mitigating such impacts is a major drain on limited conservation resources. There is thus a considerable incentive to understand which species are currently, or are likely to be, the most damaging (and concomitantly, which have minimal impacts), so that we can direct legislation and prioritize action more effectively to preventative biosecurity, early eradication, or long-term control programs. A fundamental problem here is how to compare the enormous range of impacts attributable to diverse alien taxa, acting on different levels of ecological complexity, and at different spatial and temporal scales.

 
An international team of leading experts from four continents led by Tim Blackburn from Institute of Zoology, Zoological Society of London, and including Petr Pyšek, Jan Pergl, and Mgr. Zuzana Marková from the Institute of Botany CAS in Průhonice proposes a pragmatic solution to this problem. They define scenarios describing increasing levels of impact on native species by different mechanisms. Scenarios are designed so that successively higher categories reflect an increase in the order of magnitude of the particular impact mechanism (impacts on native individuals, populations, communities), so that the magnitudes of impacts caused by different mechanisms are directly comparable. A species assigned to a higher impact category is considered to have had a greater deleterious impact on some aspect of an environment in which it is alien than a species in a lower impact category.
 
The scheme allows ranking of alien species from different animal and plant groups according to the magnitude of their environmental impacts into so-called Black Lists of harmful species. It is designed to have a similar structure and logic to the widely adopted International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List for categorizing extinction risk. Like the IUCN Red List, it can be used to identify priority species for action, as required by international policies on biological invasions.
 
The publication appeared in the prestigious journal PLoSBiology and is the result of the workshop sImpact of the Synthesis Centre for Biodiversity sciences (sDiv) of the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) Halle-Jena-Leipzig.
 
Blackburn, T.M.; Essl, F.; Evans, T.; Hulme, P.E.; Jeschke, J.M.; Kühn, I.; Kumschick, S.; Marková, Z.; Mrugała, A.; Nentwig, W.; Pergl, J.; Pyšek, P.; Rabitsch, W.; Ricciardi, A.; Richardson, D.M.; Sendek, A.; Vilà, M.; Wilson, J.R.U.; Winter, M.; Genovesi, P.; Bacher, S. (2014) A Unified Classification of Alien Species Based on the Magnitude of their Environmental Impacts. PLoSBiology 12(5), e1001850.
http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.1001850
 
Contact: Petr Pyšek, Institute of Botany of the CAS, tel.: 271 015 266, e-mail: pysek@ibot.cas.cz
Photo: Petr Pyšek a Tim Blackburn
Prepared by: Institute of Botany of the CAS and Department of Media Communications of the Head Office of the CAS
 

 

12 May 2014