Abstract
AbstractThe ring‐necked parakeet Psittacula krameri is one of the best‐known invasive species in the UK. It is also arguably the species whose origins as an invasive have been the subject of the greatest speculation, with explanations ranging from birds escaping from the set of the film ‘The African Queen’ to animals being released in Carnaby Street in London by Jimi Hendrix in the 1960s. Here, we use geographic profiling – a statistical technique originally developed in criminology to prioritise the large lists of suspects typical in cases of serial crime such as murder, rape and arson, but more recently applied to ecology and conservation biology – to analyse the spatial patterns of the ring‐necked parakeet, from the first detailed records in the 1960s to the 21st century and ask whether spatial analysis supports these hypotheses. We show that, despite the undoubted appeal of the different hypotheses concerning their origin, spatial analysis provides no support for any of them, leading us to conclude that the birds' establishment in Britain is more likely to be a consequence of repeated releases and introductions, a view supported by a detailed search of the British Newspaper Archive. More generally, our study shows how geographic profiling can be used to understand the spatial patterns of biological invasions over time.
Highlights
Biological invasions by alien species can have significant effects on native biota and are widely considered one of the most serious threats to biodiversity at the global level (Simberloff et al, 2013; Hernandez-Brito et al, 2018)
The European populations of P. krameri largely derive from the Indian subcontinent (Jackson et al, 2015), where they can be found in a range of habitats from semi-desert to light secondary jungle
The model breaks down the difficult problem of estimating the locations of multiple sources into two much simpler problems using a Gibbs sampler (Geman & Geman, 1984), repeating these steps many thousands of times using standard Bayesian Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods until it converges on the posterior distribution of interest
Summary
Biological invasions by alien species can have significant effects on native biota and are widely considered one of the most serious threats to biodiversity at the global level (Simberloff et al, 2013; Hernandez-Brito et al, 2018). The European populations of P. krameri largely derive from the Indian subcontinent (Jackson et al, 2015), where they can be found in a range of habitats from semi-desert to light secondary jungle (https://www.hbw.com/species/ rose-ringed-parakeet-psittacula-krameri). It is considered a synanthropic species, meaning that individuals benefit from living within close proximity to humans, where they utilize the artificial habitats that humans create, for example, where domestic bird feeders diminish the necessity to seek out food during the winter months (Strubbe & Mattheysen, 2009; Clergeau & Vergnes, 2011)
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