Alien Species.vp - IUCN

Management and research recommendations
Biological invasions are a global problem with solutions that may lie beyond the area of
distribution of a particular alien species, and which concern should be extended to socioeconomic
sectors besides environmental and natural resource management agencies. Policy
and management practices should be reinforced to deter propagule pressure of alien plants in
European and North African countries. Recommendations should include:
1. Fostering cooperation between several economic sectors whose activities have the
greatest probability to introduce alien species: industry, tourism, trade, agencies
responsible for water supply, etc.;
2. Avoiding the use of alien plants in restoration and mitigation programmes and
promoting the use of native species;
3. Improving the screening protocols to detect alien species in the borders between
countries and at customs, especially when primary products are imported (e.g. wood,
grains).
4. Increase the public awareness of plant invasions especially in protected areas highly
visited by tourists.
We advocate that if ecologists are going to advise policies and management practices to deal
with biological invasions, more research should be conducted beyond the ecology of biological
invasions. We envision several avenues for future research at several spatial and temporal
scales:
1. Including or concentrating on other types of organisms (i.e., animals, pathogens);
2. Discerning which components of development are more likely to influence introduction
and spread of alien species;
3. Focusing on specific countries or regions (e.g., islands, coastal areas) and extend to the
relationship between biological invasions and land-use variables (e.g., fragmentation,
protected areas, existence of corridors); and
4. Relating flows (rates of change in the abundance of aliens) rather than pools (abundance
of aliens at a specific point in time) to economic changes (Baiocchi and Dalmazzone,
2000).
This research agenda requires not only good data sets of naturalised species’ abundance and
distribution and how they have changed over time; it also offers an excellent arena for
interdisciplinary research. Collaboration between ecologists, geographers, land use planners
and economists is required to investigate in more depth the main (non-ecological) causes of
biological invasions.
Acknowledgements
We thank B. Neches for inspiring this project and B.N.K. Davis and G. Oliveira for valuable
suggestions. This project was partially funded by the IGBP-GCTE Programme, the Global
Invasive Species Programme (GISP) and the Generalitat de Catalunya (CICYT).
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Human dimensions of invasive alien species