A new protocol for identifying and categorising the environmental impacts of alien species may help invasion biologists to complete a global stocktake on the environmental impacts of all known alien species by 2020.
C·I·B core team member Sabrina Kumschick and C·I·B associate Petr Pyšek, together with collaborators from Europe, developed a concise tool to put a figure on the impacts of alien species.
According to research conducted by C·I·B post-doctoral fellow Katelyn Faulkner (with C·I·B core team members Mark Robertson, Mathieu Rouget and John Wilson), border control should focus on vectors that transport many alien species from countries with climates similar to that of South Africa.
Plants that can self-fertilise are more likely to become invasive than those that cannot and among invasive plants, those that can self-fertilise have invaded larger areas. While this is intuitive, it has not yet been shown that this is a causal relationship, as many introduced plants receive visits from pollinators in the novel range.
It’s an old idea that plants that are specialised for particular pollinators should become invasive less often than those which can be pollinated by a broad range of animal species. Most plant species will not encounter their original pollinators when introduced elsewhere so to reproduce in their novel range they will have to recruit novel pollinators.