Opinion
Invasion Biology: Specific Problems and Possible Solutions

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Trends

Global analyses and recent syntheses confirm what the scientific community has claimed for decades: biological invasions cause major impacts and are a major cause of biodiversity loss worldwide.

Despite increasing evidence, the importance of biological invasions is not generally acknowledged by the public, is not fully accepted by decision makers, and has even recently been increasingly disputed by some scientists.

The mismatch between the urgency to deal with a major environmental issue and the little concern it receives from several key components of society needs to be recognized and the underlying reasons identified and addressed.

Many reasons for this mismatch are not shared with other global change aspects and are specific to invasion biology; in particular, these include difficulties in raising awareness and understanding as well as in obtaining support for the implementation of conservation programs.

Biological invasions have been unambiguously shown to be one of the major global causes of biodiversity loss. Despite the magnitude of this threat and recent scientific advances, this field remains a regular target of criticism – from outright deniers of the threat to scientists questioning the utility of the discipline. This unique situation, combining internal strife and an unaware society, greatly hinders the progress of invasion biology. It is crucial to identify the specificities of this discipline that lead to such difficulties. We outline here 24 specificities and problems of this discipline and categorize them into four groups: understanding, alerting, supporting, and implementing the issues associated with invasive alien species, and we offer solutions to tackle these problems and push the field forward.

Section snippets

Invasion Biology in Turmoil

Despite some recent strife [1], invasion biology is generally regarded as an important and useful scientific endeavor at the crossroads of ecology and conservation biology [2]. It has a strong management component because it is – just like conservation biology – both a field of research and a field of action. Support from society is therefore essential for this discipline – from the policy makers that decide the focus of research programs to the citizens that can help to implement management

Specific Difficulties Related to Invasion Biology

We identify here 24 specific difficulties and problems of invasion biology that we, as scientists, need to act upon. We classify these problems into four distinct types of difficulties: understanding, alerting, supporting, and implementing issues stemming from invasion biology.

Scientific Progress

Although invasion biology has grown enormously in the past decades, a new level must now be reached to face the current challenges of this field both from within and outside. As suggested above, improving the theoretical corpus and developing new predictive tools, both at the level of ecosystem trajectories and at larger scales (scenarios for global invasions in the coming decades), would benefit the discipline not only regarding the issue of understanding but also well beyond, into alerting

Acknowledgments

We thank Christoph Kueffer for helpful discussions and Marcel Rejmánek for useful suggestions. This work was carried out in the context of the BiodivERsA European Research Area (ERA)-Net FFII grant, Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR) and BNP Paribas grant InvaCost and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) grants JE 288/8-1, JE 288/9-1.

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