No saturation in the accumulation of alien species worldwide

By Hanno Seebens, Tim M Blackburn, E. Dyer, P. Genovesi, P. E. Hulme, Jonathan M Jeschke, S. Pagad, Petr Pyšek, M. Winter, M. Arianoutsou and 35 more. Nature Communications, 2017

2,224 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Although research on human-mediated exchanges of species has substantially intensified during the last centuries, we know surprisingly little about temporal dynamics of alien species accumulations across regions and taxa. Using a novel database of 45,813 first records of 16,926 established alien species, we show that the annual rate of first records worldwide has increased during the last 200 years, with 37% of all first records reported most recently (1970–2014). Inter-continental and inter-taxonomic variation can be largely attributed to the diaspora of European settlers in the nineteenth century and to the acceleration in trade in the twentieth century. For all taxonomic groups, the increase in numbers of alien species does not show any sign of saturation and most taxa even show increases in the rate of first records over time. This highlights that past efforts to mitigate invasions have not been effective enough to keep up with increasing globalization. Alien species of animals and plants can invade new regions of the earth. This study performs a global analysis of temporal dynamics and spatial patterns of alien species introductions over the past 200 years, and reports no saturation in the rate at which these invasion are increasing.

Subfields: Ecological Modeling, Ecology, Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0e22ad61191651ad7c20456c7b2e547d0af761d7

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Citations in the corpus

Diversity, biogeography and the global flows of alien amphibians and reptiles (2017, positive): “This is in accordance with trends of first records observed for many other taxonomic groups including vascular plants, birds, insects, molluscs, crustaceans and algae (Seebens et al., 2017).”
The economic costs of biological invasions around the world (2021, positive): “This special issue highlights the need to publicly document the high economic impact that alien species can have on people’s lives, especially since the number of biological invasions is projected to increase (Seebens et al. 2017; Essl et al. 2020).”
Global rise in emerging alien species results from increased accessibility of new source pools (2018, neutral): “An analysis of the first-record rates is not straightforward as several statistical challenges have to be overcome: (i) the relationships of first-record rates to explanatory variables can be expected to be nonlinear as indicated in previous studies (1, 47), (ii) first-record rates are not normally ”
The status of biological invasions and their management in South Africa (2018, neutral): “Information on the spread of fish species Seebens et al. (2017) Information on global trends in the introduction of alien species South African Government (2017) Socio-economic information on fishing StatsSA tourism and migration statistics (Statistics South Africa 2017) Socio-economic information…”
Projecting the continental accumulation of alien species through to 2050 (2020, positive): “The overall results may not be entirely surprising given the continuous increase in alien species numbers observed during the last decades (Seebens et al., 2017), but we here provide a first quantitative baseline for the assessment of how biological invasions may unfold in the future.”
The Ecology and Evolution of Alien Plants (2018, positive): “Most of these naturalizations occurred in the last two centuries, and although the rate at which newly naturalized alien species are discovered has plateaued, it is not decreasing yet (Seebens et al. 2017).”
Alien versus native species as drivers of recent extinctions (2019, positive): “The accelerating rate of establishment by alien species worldwide (Seebens et al. 2017, 2018) is a particular concern in this respect.”
Small urban centres as launching sites for plant invasions in natural areas: insights from South Africa (2017, positive): “Seebens et al. (2017) found no saturation in the accumulation of alien species across the world.”