A Unified Classification of Alien Species Based on the Magnitude of their Environmental Impacts

By T. Blackburn, F. Essl, T. Evans, P. Hulme, Jonathan M. Jeschke, I. Kühn, S. Kumschick, Zuzana Marková, A. Mrugała, Wolfgang Nentwig and 11 more. PLoS Biology, 2014

897 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present a method for categorising and comparing alien or invasive species in terms of how damaging they are to the environment, that can be applied across all taxa, scales, and impact metrics.

Subfields: Ecological Modeling, Ecology, Nature and Landscape Conservation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/47c34b11a35509d63bf07e154e197d815a63d324

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Ecological Modeling

1. D. Richardson
2. Petr Pyšek
3. Antoine Guisan
4. Wilfried Thuiller
5. M. Vilà
6. O. Broennimann
7. F. Essl
8. P. Hulme

In Ecology

1. Petr Pyšek
2. D. Richardson
3. P. Hulme
4. Jonathan M. Jeschke
5. I. Kühn
6. M. Vilà
7. Jan Pergl
8. S. Kumschick

In Nature and Landscape Conservation

1. Petr Pyšek
2. D. Richardson
3. I. Kühn
4. M. Vilà
5. P. Hulme
6. Jan Pergl
7. Jonathan M. Jeschke
8. John R. U. Wilson

Citations in the corpus

• Unravelling the global invasion routes of a worldwide invader, the red swamp crayfish (Procambarus clarkii) (2019, background): “Biological invasions 74 today are perceived as major components of global change, with severe negative environmental 75 (Simberloff et al., 2013; Blackburn et al., 2014; Jeschke et al., 2014) and socio-economic impacts 76 (Vilà et al., 2010).”
• Ecological impacts of invading seaweeds: a meta‐analysis of their effects at different trophic levels (2015, background): “Despite such a large research effort, a comprehensive framework for understanding the impacts of invaders is still lacking, likely as a consequence of the difficulties in distilling generalities from disparate case studies (Vil a et al., 2011; Blackburn et al., 2014; Jeschke et al., 2014).”
• Biological Flora of the British Isles: Ambrosia artemisiifolia (2015, background): “Accordingly, the environmental consequences of invasion of A. artemisiifolia in Europe qualify as ‘no impact’ according to the impact assessment scheme of Blackburn et al. (2014).”
• The status of biological invasions and their management in South Africa (2018, methodology): “29 Evans, T., Kumschick, S. & Blackburn, T. M. (2016) Application of the Environmental Impact 30 Classification for Alien Taxa (EICAT) to a global assessment of alien bird impacts.”
• Mapping the impact of alien species on marine ecosystems: the Mediterranean Sea case study (2016, background): “…range from singlespecies interactions and reduction in individual fitness of native species to population declines, local extinctions, changes in community composition, and effects on entire ecosystem processes and wider ecosystem function (Blackburn et al., 2014; Katsanevakis et al., 2014a).”
• The threat of invasive species to IUCN-listed critically endangered species: A systematic review (2021, background): “…species; taxonomic group; location of the study (mainland or island); country; environment (marine, freshwater or terrestrial); andmechanisms of interaction (predation, competition, hybridization, disease, herbivory or habitat alteration), according to the classification by Blackburn et al. (2014).”
• Global meta‐analysis of the impacts of terrestrial invertebrate invaders on species, communities and ecosystems (2016, background): “Yet our general understanding of patterns of impacts and the processes determining these patterns remains limited (Blackburn et al., 2014; Jeschke et al., bs_bs_banner Global Ecology and Biogeography, (Global Ecol. Biogeogr.) (2016)”
• A vision for global monitoring of biological invasions (2017, background): “Even at the earliest stages of data gathering, alien species occurrence data at coarse scale can be combined with information generated from the other two Essential Variables to inform country actions and feed into global reports (Blackburn et al., 2014).”
• The importance of assessing positive and beneficial impacts of alien species (2020, methodology): “Such approaches, however, define the highest levels of impact magnitude according to the capacity of alien species to cause the extinction of a native species (Olenin et al. 2007; Blackburn et al. 2014).”
• Framework and guidelines for implementing the proposed IUCN Environmental Impact Classification for Alien Taxa (EICAT) (2015, methodology): “…of Botany, The Czech Academy of Sciences, Průhonice CZ252 43, Czech Republic, 13Department of Ecology, Faculty of Science, Charles Recently, Blackburn et al. (2014) developed a simple, objective and transparent method for classifying alien taxa in terms of the magnitude of their…”
• Invader Relative Impact Potential: a new metric to understand and predict the ecological impacts of existing, emerging and future invasive alien species (2017, background): “This has also hindered those who require better risk assessments for invaders since, although invasion history can inform likely future impacts of an invader (Kulhanek, Ricciardi & Leung 2011; Ricciardi et al. 2013; Blackburn et al. 2014), there is currently no way of predicting the ecological impac”
• IUCN SSC Invasive Species Specialist Group: invasive alien species information management supporting practitioners, policy makers and decision takers (2015, methodology): “The method is based on the mechanisms of impact described in GISD (see Blackburn et al. 2014).”