Models supporting prioritization of management actions
Climate change and biological invasions represent two of the major threats to biodiversity in the so-called “Anthropocene”.
Climate change can severely impact on native species, increasing their risk of extinction, and can favor the invasion of alien species as climatic conditions play an important role in their survival, growth, and distribution.
Assessing the risk of invasion by alien species is a crucial step for proactive management, including identifying species for preventive actions such as legal bans on trade, transport, and possession, targeting early detection efforts both at entry points and in susceptible ecosystems, as well as adopting and prioritizing management actions to remove established populations or limit their further spread.
Species distribution models (SDMs) are the main tools for forecasting the risk of establishment of an alien species in a spatially explicit way. SDMs predict the probability of species’ presence in unsampled areas, based on species biological characteristics (traits) characteristic, habitat suitability and climatic conditions.
There is an active debate on how to improve the reliability and transferability of SDMs for invasive species, and new conceptual and methodological approaches are published.
A recent study illustrates the recently developed WiSDM workflow to generate reproducible risk maps for potentially invasive alien species under scenarios of climate change at a high spatial resolution (1 km2). WiSDM is an open, reproducible, and flexible workflow for generating invasion risk forecasts for use in invasive species risk assessment and management.
In another study, Australian acacias alien to South Africa were used as a case study to model their potential distribution under climate change scenarios: the use of SDMs showed that potential impacts would decrease under current climate change trend. Results indicate that the projected suitable areas for alien Acacia species in South Africa are reduced under climate change. However, the impact risk differed according to the protection status: remains high in areas of high protection (such as national parks) and low for private protected areas (with lower protection status).
Therefore, the use of SDMs is essential for government and non-government agencies for nature conservation and to guide management and decision-making related to invasive species, but require transparent and reproducible workflows for acceptance by stakeholders and policy makers.