Global rise in emerging alien species results from increased accessibility of new source pools

Seebens, H; Blackburn, TM; Dyer, EE; Genovesi, P; Hulme, PE; Jeschke, JM; Pagad, S; Pysek, P; van Kleunen, M; Winter, M; Ansong, M; Arianoutsou, M; Bacher, Sven; Blasius, B; Brockerhoff, EG; Brundu, G; Capinha, C; Causton, CE; Celesti-Grapow, L; Dawson, W; ... (2018). Global rise in emerging alien species results from increased accessibility of new source pools. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America - PNAS, 115(10), E2264-E2273. National Academy of Sciences NAS 10.1073/pnas.1719429115

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Our ability to predict the identity of future invasive alien species is largely based upon knowledge of prior invasion history. Emerging alien species—those never encountered as aliens before—there-fore pose a significant challenge to biosecurity interventions worldwide. Understanding their temporal trends, origins, and the drivers of their spread is pivotal to improving prevention and risk assessment tools. Here, we use a database of 45,984 first records of 16,019 established alien species to investigate the temporal dy-namics of occurrences of emerging alien species worldwide. Even after many centuries of invasions the rate of emergence of new alien species is still high: One-quarter of first records during 2000–2005 were of species that had not been previously recorded any-where as alien, though with large variation across taxa. Model results show that the high proportion of emerging alien species cannot be solely explained by increases in well-known drivers such as the amount of imported commodities from historically impor-tant source regions. Instead, these dynamics reflect the incorpora-tion of new regions into the pool of potential alien species, likely as a consequence of expanding trade networks and environmental change. This process compensates for the depletion of the histor-ically important source species pool through successive invasions. We estimate that 1–16% of all species on Earth, depending on the taxonomic group, qualify as potential alien species. These results suggest that there remains a high proportion of emerging alien species we have yet to encounter, with future impacts that are difficult to predict.

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