Abstract
AlienScenarios, a three-year project starting in March 2019, will evaluate for the first time the range of plausible futures of biological invasions for the 21st century. AlienScenarios consists of seven project partners and seven integrated complementary subprojects. We will develop the qualitative narratives for plausible futures of global alien species richness and impacts in the 21st century – the Alien Species Narratives (ASNs). The ASNs further serve as overarching concept to parameterize quantitative models of global, continental and regional futures of biological invasions. We will also establish the first global mechanistic invasion model considering major processes of biological invasions such as source pools, driver dynamics and establishment rates. Further, we will assess the impacts of invasive alien species (IAS) in terms of economic costs according to the different ASNs. In addition, we will assess the consequences of different levels of implementation of the European Union Regulation on IAS. Providing some more detailed regional information, we will analyse changes of the functional composition of communities in mountain regions under different scenario storylines and will extend the analyses to the Global South using Panama as a country-level case study. Finally, the results of the other WPs will be synthesized, and the approach and results of AlienScenarios will be discussed with and communicated to stakeholders and the wider community. AlienScenarios will provide crucially needed insights for pro-active alien species management and policy. It will thus make an important contribution to global assessments and projections of biodiversity and ecosystem services, as well as regional policies (e.g. EU regulation on IAS).
Highlights
Human agency has modified virtually every facet of the biophysical environment (Lewis and Maslin 2015) with profound implications for the status, distribution and resilience of biodiversity worldwide (Leadley et al 2010)
We will extend the results from scenario development (WPs I, II, IV) to species traits, i.e. to the increase or decrease in specific traits. This means that we will consider the magnitude of change in terms of species richness (WPs II, IV), but will consider which traits will benefit or suffer under the respective scenarios. We will applying both network analyses as well as already existing trait distribution models (e.g. Kühn et al 2006, 2009), by combining the same environmental drivers as in work packages (WPs) III on land use, climate with traits and propagule pressure to project which trait compositions to expect under different Alien Species Narratives (ASNs) assumptions
AlienScenarios will provide results that will be useful for elucidating potential trajectories of invasions at different scales, and for different purposes
Summary
Human agency has modified virtually every facet of the biophysical environment (Lewis and Maslin 2015) with profound implications for the status, distribution and resilience of biodiversity worldwide (Leadley et al 2010). Several major drivers of biodiversity loss have been identified with climate change, land-use change and invasive alien species (IAS) being among the most important ones (Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity 2014). Changes in climate and land use have received much attention during the last decades, which resulted in readily available scenarios (Lamarque et al 2005; Moss et al 2010; Hurtt et al 2011; IPCC 2014; Popp et al 2016). Comparable approaches are completely missing for biological invasions despite their importance in driving biodiversity losses (Simberloff et al 2013; Blackburn et al 2014), and causing substantial negative impacts on human livelihoods (Pejchar and Mooney 2009). A thorough evaluation of plausible future trajectories of biological invasions is urgently needed to (i) enable comprehensive assessments of biodiversity changes for the decades to come, (ii) allow better-informed decisions of policy makers and stakeholders (Ferrier et al 2016) and (iii) examine the future implications of different societal responses for biological invasions
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