You might think they should be easy to identify – invasive species are seemingly everywhere we look, even carried inadvertently by people to the polar regions. And as one of the biggest threats to biodiversity, identifying which species are likely to become invasive is important.
Australia has some of the strictest quarantine measures in the world, based partly on trying to identify which species will be permitted to enter the country because the risk of invasiveness is low. Yet the number of naturalized species in Australia continues to rise, and the species are becoming more phylogenetically diverse, with increasing diversity of trading partners.
Why can’t we do a better job of identifying which species will become invasive? Well, a new paper led by Jane Catford identifies one problem.
Attempts to identify invasive species have usually compared their traits to those of non-invasive species. Yet invasive species are classified…
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Ecological Change 