Thursday, February 4, 2010

Winning battles, losing war on invasive species

Environment News Service: Invasive alien species are one of the top three threats to the biodiversity of life on Earth, according to the first assessment report on invasives in 57 countries coordinated by the Global Invasive Species Programme, GISP.

Invasives can be rats, mice, foxes, goats, toads, fish, plants, ants or micro-organisms, to list a few. Spread around the planet by international travel, trade, and tourism, these alien invaders are jeopardizing global biodiversity by out-competing native species for resources, altering ecosystem functions and changing ecological relationships among native species.
Feral goats in New South Wales, Australia trample soils, degrading soil stability and causing erosion. Goats can be helpful when they are set to graze on invasive plants. (Photo courtesy Govt. NSW)

GISP Executive Director Dr. Sarah Simons said, "Despite the enormous costs, not only to biodiversity but also food security, human health, trade, transport and more broadly, economic development, invasive species continue to receive inadequate attention from policymakers and in 2010, there is simply no excuse for not tackling one of the greatest threats to the environmental and economic well-being of our planet."

The international team of investigators who wrote the GISP report documented a total of 542 species acting as invasive aliens - 316 plants, 101 marine organisms, 44 freshwater fish, 43 mammal, 23 bird and 15 amphibian species.

Professor Melodie McGeoch, lead author of the report and member of the Centre for Invasion at South Africa's Stellenbosch University, says these numbers underestimate the extent of invasive aliens. "We showed that regions with low development status and little investment in research have lower than expected numbers of invasive aliens," said McGeoch....

Mangrove Jack, shot by Taro Taylor, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license

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