RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Capacity of countries to reduce biological invasions
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 2021.02.04.429788
DO 10.1101/2021.02.04.429788
A1 Guillaume Latombe
A1 Hanno Seebens
A1 Bernd Lenzner
A1 Franck Courchamp
A1 Stefan Dullinger
A1 Marina Golivets
A1 Ingolf Kühn
A1 Brian Leung
A1 Núria Roura-Pascual
A1 Emma Cebrian
A1 Wayne Dawson
A1 Christophe Diagne
A1 Jonathan M. Jeschke
A1 Cristian Perez-Granados
A1 Chunlong Liu
A1 Dietmar Moser
A1 Anna Turbelin
A1 Piero Visconti
A1 Franz Essl
YR 2021
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2021/02/06/2021.02.04.429788.abstract
AB The extent and impacts of biological invasions on biodiversity are largely shaped by an array of socio-ecological predictors, which exhibit high variation among countries. Yet a global synthetic perspective of how these factors vary across countries is currently lacking. Here, we investigate how a set of five socio-ecological predictors (Governance, Trade, Environmental Performance, Lifestyle and Education, Innovation) explain i) country-level established alien species (EAS) richness of eight taxonomic groups, and ii) country capacity to prevent and manage biological invasions and their impacts. Trade and Governance together best predicted the average EAS richness, increasing variance explained by up to 54% compared to models based on climatic and spatial variables only. Country-level EAS richness increased strongly with Trade, whereas high level of Governance resulted in lower EAS richness. Historical (1996) levels of Governance and Trade better explained response variables than current (2015) levels. Thus, our results reveal a historical legacy of these two predictors with profound implications for the future of biological invasions. We therefore used Governance and Trade to define a two-dimensional socio-economic space in which the position of a country captures its capacity to address issues of biological invasions. Our results provide novel insights into the complex relationship between socio-ecological predictors and biological invasions. Further, we highlight the need for designing better policies and management measures for alien species, and for integrating biological invasions in global environmental scenarios.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.