Origin might matter; people matter, too (a response to the comment by Rejmánek and Simberloff (2017))

Abstract

We appreciate Rejmánek and Simberloff's (2017; henceforth R&S) response to our paper, as well as their review of the biological studies showing that non-native species are a ‘non-random’ group of species that are more likely to cause problems at some point in time than would be expected by chance. We note that the focus of their response lies almost exclusively on recently introduced species, which suggests that their argument might be less defensible for established introductions such as the ones covered by our study (Van der Wal et al. 2015). Moreover, R&S appear to have missed the major point of our paper, which is socio-cultural rather than strictly biological, so we briefly respond here in order to clarify our objective and results.