invasive species | ConservationBytes.com

Assessing the massive costs of biological invasions to Australia and the world

6 09 2023

A global database set up by scientists to assemble data on the economic cost of biological invasions in support of effective government management strategies has grown to include all known invasive species.

Now involving 145 researchers from 44 countries — the current version of InvaCost has 13,553 entries in 22 languages and enables scientists to develop a clear picture about the major threats globally of invasive species to ecosystems, biodiversity, and human well-being.

Biological invasions are caused by species introduced on purpose or accidentally by humans to areas outside of their natural ranges. From cats and weeds, to crop pests and diseases, invasive species are a worldwide scourge.

Invasive species have cost over US$2 trillion globally since the 1970s by damaging goods and services, and through the costs of managing them, and these economic costs are only increasing.

A new synthesis published in the journal BioScience documents the progress of the InvaCost endeavour. The study provides a timeline of the state of invasion costs, starting with prior flaws and shortcomings in the scientific literature, then how InvaCost has helped to alleviate and address these issues, and what the future potentially holds for research and policymakers.

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Tags: biodiversity, climate change, conservation, Ecological Economics, Global warming, InvaCost, invasive species
Categories : agriculture, alien species, Australia, biodiversity, climate change, conservation, environmental economics, environmental policy, extinction, invasive species, management

Video explainer — nasty alien species in Australia

15 09 2021

You know you’ve made it to the big time in Australia when Behind The News does a story on your research. Practically every kid in Australia watches the show at some point during their school years.

Although this was produced last month, I thought I’d post the entire 4-minute video here for your viewing pleasure.

When you popularise your research story for kids, it really gets the message across well.

Thank you, Natasha and BTN for this opportunity.

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Tags: Behind The News, biodiversity, conservation, Economics, environment, environmental economics, invasive alien species, invasive species, science communication, weeds
Categories : alien species, cat, conservation, economics, environmental economics, fox, invasive species

Pest plants and animals cost Australia around $25 billion a year — and it will get worse

2 08 2021

Corey J. A. Bradshaw, Flinders University and Andrew Hoskins, CSIRO

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

Shamefully, Australia has one of the highest extinction rates in the world.
And the number one threat to our species is invasive or “alien” plants and animals.

But invasive species don’t just cause extinctions and biodiversity loss – they also create a serious economic burden. Our research, published today, reveals invasive species have cost the Australian economy at least A$390 billion in the last 60 years alone.

Our paper – the most detailed assessment of its type ever published in this country – also reveals feral cats are the worst invasive species in terms of total costs, followed by rabbits and fire ants.

Without urgent action, Australia will continue to lose billions of dollars every year on invasive species.

Feral cats are Australia’s costliest invasive species. Source: Adobe Stock/240188862

Huge economic burden

Invasive species are those not native to a particular ecosystem. They are introduced either by accident or on purpose and become pests.

Some costs involve direct damage to agriculture, such as insects or fungi destroying fruit. Other examples include measures to control invasive species like feral cats and cane toads, such as paying field staff and buying fuel, ammunition, traps and poisons.

Our previous research put the global cost of invasive species at A$1.7 trillion. But this is most certainly a gross underestimate because so many data are missing.

As a wealthy nation, Australia has accumulated more reliable cost data than most other regions. These costs have increased exponentially over time – up to sixfold each decade since the 1970s.

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Tags: annual ryegrass, economic burden, environmental economics, extinction, farming, feral cats, feral pigs, foxes, heliotrope, invasive alien species, invasive species, ragwort, weeds
Categories : agriculture, alien species, Australia, biodiversity, buffalo, climate change, conservation, conservation biology, dingo, disease, ecology, economics, ecosystem, ecosystem function, ecosystem services, environmental economics, environmental policy, extinction, Flinders University, health, human-wildlife conflict, impact, invasive species, kangaroo, mammal, management, monitoring, predator

‘Living’ figures

8 07 2021

Have you ever constructed a database and then published the findings, only to realise that after the time elapsed your database is already obsolete?

This is the reality of scientific information today. There are so many of us doing so many things that information accumulates substantially in months, if not weeks. If you’re a geneticist, this probably happens for many datasets on the order of days.

While our general databasing capacity worldwide has improved enormously over the last decade with the transition to fully online and web-capable interactivity, the world of scientific publication still generally lags behind the tech. But there is a better way to communicate dynamic, evolving database results to the public.

Enter the ‘living figure’, which is a simple-enough concept where a published figure remains dynamic as its underlying database is updated.

We have, in fact, just published such a living figure based on our paper earlier this year where we reported the global costs of invasive species.

That paper was published based on version 1 of the InvaCost database, but a mere three months after publication, InvaCost is already at version 4.

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Tags: database, interactive, InvaCost, invasive alien species, invasive species
Categories : alien species, biodiversity, conservation, economics, environmental economics, invasive species

Killing (feral) cats quickly (and efficiently)

20 05 2021

I’m pleased to announce the publication of a paper led by Kathryn Venning (KV) that was derived from her Honours work in the lab. Although she’s well into her PhD on an entirely different topic, I’m overjoyed that she persevered and saw this work to publication.

As you probably already know, feral cats are a huge problem in Australia. The are probably the primary reason Australia leads the world in mammal extinctions in particular, and largely the reason so many re-introduction attempts of threatened marsupials fail miserably only after a few years.

Feral cats occupy every habitat in the country, from the high tropics to the deserts, and from the mountains to the sea. They adapt to the cold just as easily as they adapt to the extreme heat, and they can eat just about anything that moves, from invertebrates to the carcases of much larger animals that they scavenge.

Cats are Australia’s bane, but you can’t help but be at least a little impressed with their resilience.

Still, we have to try our best to get rid of them where we can, or at least reduce their densities to the point where their ecological damage is limited.

Typically, the only efficient and cost-effective way to do that is via lethal control, but by using various means. These can include direct shooting, trapping, aerial poison-baiting, and a new ‘smart’ method of targeted poison delivery via a prototype device known as a Felixer™️. The latter are particularly useful for passive control in areas where ground-shooting access is difficult.

A live Felixer™️ deployed on Kangaroo Island (photo: CJA Bradshaw 2020)

A few years back the federal government committed what might seem like a sizeable amount of money to ‘eradicate’ cats from Australia. Yeah, good luck with that, although the money has been allocated to several places where cat reduction and perhaps even eradication is feasible. Namely, on islands.

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Tags: Australia, control, ecological restoration, eradication, feral cats, invasive species, Predation, restoration
Categories : alien species, Australia, cat, conservation, conservation biology, decline, demography, ecology, economics, environmental economics, extinction, harvest, human-wildlife conflict, invasive species, investment, mammal, management, modelling, planning, population dynamics, population viability analysis, predation, predator, research, restoration, South Australia, southern Australia, threatened species

Attack of the alien invaders: pest plants and animals leave a frightening $1.7 trillion bill

19 04 2021

They’re one of the most damaging environmental forces on Earth. They’ve colonised pretty much every place humans have set foot on the planet. Yet you might not even know they exist.

We’re talking about alien species. Not little green extraterrestrials, but invasive plants and animals not native to an ecosystem and which become pests. They might be plants from South America, starfish from Africa, insects from Europe or birds from Asia.

These species can threaten the health of plants and animals, including humans. And they cause huge economic harm. Our research, recently published in the journal Nature, puts a figure on that damage. We found that globally, invasive species cost US$1.3 trillion (A$1.7 trillion) in money lost or spent between 1970 and 2017.

The cost is increasing exponentially over time. And troublingly, most of the cost relates to the damage and losses invasive species cause. Meanwhile, far cheaper control and prevention measures are often ignored.

Yellow crazy ants attacking a gecko — Yellow crazy ants, such as these attacking a gecko, are among thousands of invasive species causing ecological and economic havoc. Dinakarr, CC0, Wikimedia Commons

An expansive toll

Invasive species have been invading foreign territories for centuries. They hail from habitats as diverse as tropical forests, dry savannas, temperate lakes and cold oceans.

They arrived because we brought them — as pets, ornamental plants or as stowaways on our holidays or via commercial trade.

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Tags: alien species, Economics, environmental economics, invasive alien spcies, invasive species, weeds
Categories : Africa, agriculture, alien species, Australia, biodiversity, conservation, disease, environmental economics, environmental policy, fish, health, invasive species, management, predator

One trillion dollars!

1 04 2021

Or thereabouts.

Let’s step back to 2015. In a former life when I was at another institution, I had the immense fortune and pleasure to spend six months on sabbatical in a little village just south of Paris working with my friend and colleague, Franck Courchamp, at Université Paris-Sud (now Université Paris-Saclay).

Sure, I felt a bit jammy living there with my daughter in a beautiful house just down the street from two mouth-watering pâtisseries and three different open marchés. We ate well. We picked mushrooms on the weekends or visited local châteaux. We went into the city and visited overwhelmingly beautiful museums at our leisure. We drank good champagne (well, I did, not my eight-year old). We had communal raclettes.

But of course, I was primarily there to do research with Franck and his lab, despite the obvious perks.

While I busied myself with several tasks while there, one of our main outputs was to put together the world’s first global database of the costs of invasive insects, which we subsequently published in 2016.

But that was only the beginning. With funding that started off the process with insects, Franck persevered and hired postdocs and took on more students to build the most comprehensive database of all invasive species ever compiled — InvaCost.

I cannot stress enough how massive an undertaking this was. It’s not simply a big list of all the cost estimates in existence, it’s also a detailed assessment of cost reliability, standardisation, and contextualisation. I’m not sure I would have had the courage to do this myself.

While the database itself has already been published, today we are pleased to announce the publication in Nature of the main results — High and rising economic costs of biological invasions worldwide — led by Christophe Diagne (one of the nicest people I’ve ever met), and co-authored by Boris Leroy, Anne-Charlotte Vaissière, Rodolphe Gozlan, David Roiz, Ivan Jarić, Jean-Michel Salles, me, and Franck Courchamp (of course).

Herein we described how the economic costs of invasive alien species accumulated since 1970 are tremendous, and that they have been steadily increasing over time.

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Tags: alien species, biological invasions, costs, expenditure, InvaCost, invasive species
Categories : agriculture, alien species, biodiversity, climate change, conservation, economics, environmental economics, environmental policy, invasive species, management, predator, research

Worried about Earth’s future? Well, the outlook is worse than even scientists can grasp

14 01 2021

Corey J. A. Bradshaw, Flinders University; Daniel T. Blumstein, University of California, Los Angeles, and Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University

Anyone with even a passing interest in the global environment knows all is not well. But just how bad is the situation? Our new paper shows the outlook for life on Earth is more dire than is generally understood.

The research published today reviews more than 150 studies to produce a stark summary of the state of the natural world. We outline the likely future trends in biodiversity decline, mass extinction, climate disruption and planetary toxification. We clarify the gravity of the human predicament and provide a timely snapshot of the crises that must be addressed now.

The problems, all tied to human consumption and population growth, will almost certainly worsen over coming decades. The damage will be felt for centuries and threatens the survival of all species, including our own.

Our paper was authored by 17 leading scientists, including those from Flinders University, Stanford University and the University of California, Los Angeles. Our message might not be popular, and indeed is frightening. But scientists must be candid and accurate if humanity is to understand the enormity of the challenges we face.

Girl in breathing mask attached ot plant in container

Getting to grips with the problem

First, we reviewed the extent to which experts grasp the scale of the threats to the biosphere and its lifeforms, including humanity. Alarmingly, the research shows future environmental conditions will be far more dangerous than experts currently believe. Read the rest of this entry »

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Tags: agriculture, alien species, Anthropocene, biodiversity, biowealth, bushmeat, carbon, climate change, climate shift, conservation, coral reefs, decline, deforestation, development, disease, drought, Economics, Ecosystem, ecosystem function, ecosystem services, Education, Endarkenment, environmental economics, environmental policy, Environmental science, exploitation, extinction, extremism, fire, food, function, governance, habitat loss, harvest, health, human overpopulation, impact, invasive species, ocean, planning, pollination, poverty, propaganda, science, threatened species, toxification
Categories : Africa, agriculture, alien species, anthropocene, biodiversity, biowealth, carbon, climate change, climate shift, conservation, conservation biology, corruption, decline, deforestation, development, disease, drought, economics, ecosystem services, education, Endarkenment, environmental economics, environmental policy, environmental science, extinction, extinction debt, extremism, fire, Flinders University, governance, habitat loss, harvest, health, human overpopulation, investment, livestock, logging, management, ocean, planning, propaganda, restoration, science, seagrass, sustainability, synergies, threatened species, toxification, vegetation

How to improve (South Australia’s) biodiversity prospects

9 04 2019

Figure 2 (from the article). Overlaying the South Australia’s Protected Areas boundary data with the Interim Biogeographic Regionalisation for Australia layer indicates that 73.2% of the total protected area (excluding Indigenous Protected Areas) in South Australia lies in the arid biogeographic regions of Great Victoria Desert (21.1%), Channel Country (15.2%), Simpson Strzelecki Dunefields (14.0%), Nullarbor (9.8%), Stony Plains (6.6%), Gawler (6.0%), and Hampton (0.5%). The total biogeographic-region area covered by the remaining Conservation Reserves amounts to 26.2%. Background blue shading indicates relative average annual rainfall.

If you read CB.com regularly, you’ll know that late last year I blogged about the South Australia 2108 State of the Environment Report for which I was commissioned to write an ‘overview‘ of the State’s terrestrial biodiversity.

At the time I whinged that not many people seemed to take notice (something I should be used to by now in the age of extremism and not giving a tinker’s about the future health of the planet — but I digress), but it seems that quietly, quietly, at least people with some policy influence here are starting to listen.

Not satisfied with merely having my report sit on the virtual shelves at the SA Environment Protection Authority, I decided that I should probably flesh out the report and turn it into a full, peer-reviewed article.

Well, I’ve just done that, with the article now published online in Rethinking Ecology as a Perspective paper.

The paper is chock-a-block with all the same sorts of points I covered last year, but there’s a lot more, and it’s also a lot better referenced and logically sequenced.

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Tags: biodiversity, ecological restoration, Environment Protection Authority, environmental legislation, EPA, invasive species, restoration, Rethinking Ecology, SOER, South Australia, State of the Environment
Categories : agriculture, Australia, biodiversity, biowealth, birds, carbon, climate change, connectivity, conservation, conservation biology, conservation ecology, decline, deforestation, development, drought, ecology, economics, ecosystem, ecosystem function, endemic, endemism, environmental policy, exploitation, extinction, extinction debt, Flinders University, fragmentation, function, governance, habitat loss, harvest, human-wildlife conflict, invasive species, investment, livestock, management, meso-predator release, monitoring, Murray-Darling, planning, pollination, predation, prioritisation, protected area, recovery, reforestation, research, reserve, restoration, South Australia, southern Australia, sustainability, threatened species, vegetation

Greater death rates for invasive rabbits from interacting diseases

30 05 2018

When it comes to death rates for invasive European rabbits (Oryctolagus cuniculus) in Australia, it appears that 1 + 1 = 2.1.

Tagged European rabbit kitten infected with myxoma virus, but that died from rabbit haemorrhagic virus disease (RHDV). Photo by David Peacock, Biosecurity South Australia.

“Canberra, we have a problem” — Sure, it’s an old problem and much less of one than it used to be back in the 1950s, but invasive rabbits are nonetheless an ecological, conservation, and financial catastrophe across Australia.

relative rabbit abundance South Australia

Semi-schematic diagram, redrawn using data from Saunders and others and extended to include the recent spread of RHDV2, showing changes in rabbit abundance in relation to the introduction of biological control agents into north-eastern South Australia. Dotted lines indicate uncertainty due to lack of continuous annual data. The broken line indicates a level of about 0.5 rabbits ha-1, below which rabbits must be held to ensure recovery of native pastures and shrubs (from B. Cooke 2018 Vet Rec doi:10.1136/vr.k2105)

Rabbits used to reach plague numbers in much of agricultural and outback Australia, but the introduction and clever manipulation of two rather effective rabbit-specific viruses and insect vectors — first, myxoma virus in 1950, European rabbit fleas in the 1960s to help spread the virus, then Spanish rabbit fleas in the 1990s to increase spread into arid areas, and then rabbit haemorrhagic disease virus (RHDV) in 1995 — have been effective in dropping rabbit abundances by an estimated 75-80% in South Australia alone since the 1950s.

Rabbits around a waterhole at the myxomatosis trial enclosure on Wardang Island in 1938. See page for author [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

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Tags: biocontrol, calici virus, capture-mark-recapture, CMR, invasive species, MARK, multi-state models, myxoma virus, myxomatosis, Oryctolagus cuniculus, program MARK, rabbit haemorrhagic disease, rabbit haemorrhagic disease virus, rabbits
Categories : agriculture, alien species, Australia, biodiversity, biowealth, conservation, conservation biology, demography, disease, ecology, environmental science, fox, invasive species, mammal, management, modelling, monitoring, predation, predator, research, South Australia

Offshore Energy & Marine Spatial Planning

22 02 2018

I have the pleasure (and relief) of announcing a new book that’s nearly ready to buy, and I think many readers of CB.com might be interested in what it describes. I know it might be a bit premature to announce it, but given that we’ve just finished the last few details (e.g., and index) and the book is ready to pre-order online, I don’t think it’s too precocious to advertise now.

A little history is in order. The brilliant and hard-working Katherine Yates (now at the University of Salford in Manchester, UK) approached me back in 2014 to assist her with co-editing the volume that she wanted to propose for the Routledge Earthscan Ocean series. I admit that I reluctantly agreed at the time, knowing full well what was in store (anyone who has already edited a book will know what I mean). Being an active researcher in energy and biodiversity (perhaps not so much on the ‘planning’ side per se) certainly helped in my decision.

And yes, there were ups and downs, and sometimes it was a helluva lot of work, but Katherine certainly made my life easier, and she has finally driven the whole thing to completion. She deserves most of the credit.

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Tags: acoustic, aquaculture, benthic communities, benthos, biodiversity, birds, buffer zones, cables, climate change, co-location, collision, conflict, earthquake, ecosystem services, energy, energy extraction, energy security, entanglement, epifauna, eutrophication, exclusion, exclusive economic zone, Fish, fisheries, fishing, food security, gas leak, impact, infauna, intertidal, invasive species, Law of the Sea, local knowledge, marine, marine mammals, marine spatial planning, mooring lines, noise, objective function, oil and gas, oil platforms, oil spill, OSPAR, partnerships, pile-driving, pipelines, planning, platforms, pollution, portfolio theory, production, productivity, Renewable energy, renewables, resilience, resuspension, sediments, social licence, spatial planning, stakeholder engagement, stakeholders, tidal energy, trade-offs, values, wave energy, wind farms
Categories : acidification, alien species, aquaculture, biodiversity, biowealth, birds, book, carbon, climate change, climate shift, community ecology, connectivity, conservation, development, economics, ecosystem function, ecosystem services, environmental economics, environmental policy, eutrophication, exploitation, fish, fisheries, food, habitat loss, harvest, invasive species, investment, management, marine protected area, modelling, monitoring, MPA, ocean, planning, pollution, prioritisation, research, seagrass, sustainability, toxicology, toxification

Job: Research Associate in Eco-epidemiological modelling

3 03 2017

European rabbit infected with myxomatosis

Earlier this week I advertised two new PhD scholarships in palaeo-ecological modelling. Now we are pleased to advertise a six-month Research Associate position in eco-epidemiological modelling.

The position will be based in the School of Biological Sciences at Flinders University. Flinders University offers a dynamic research environment that explores the continuum of environmental and evolutionary research from the ancient to modern ecology. The School of Biological Sciences is an integrated community researching and teaching biology, and has a long history of science innovation.

Project background

Since 1996, Biosecurity South Australia has been running a capture-mark-recapture study on a European rabbit (Oryctolagus cuniculus) population located at Turretfield (~ 50 km north of Adelaide). Now into the 21^st year, this is one of the world’s longest studies of its kind. Approximately every 8 weeks cage traps are reset and the population trapped over five days, with the captured rabbits weighed, sexed, tagged and blood-sampled. The study was established to investigate the epidemiology and efficacy of the two imported rabbit biocontrol agents, rabbit haemorrhagic disease virus (RHDV) and myxomatosis. To date, from 119 formal trapping events and RHDV-outbreak carcass-sampling trips, > 4500 rabbits have been monitored with > 8700 cELISA RHDV antibody tests and 7500 IgG, IgM and IgA RHDV antibody tests on sera (similarly for myxomatosis), and 111 RHDV-specific polymerase chain reaction (PCR) analyses run on tissue samples of the sampled rabbits. This represents an unparalleled dataset on rabbit survival, population fluctuations and disease dynamics. Read the rest of this entry »

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Tags: biocontrol, biosecurity, employment, invasive species, job, modelling, myxomatosis, population dynamics, rabbits, Research associate, rhdv
Categories : conservation, invasive species, jobs, modelling, restoration

The Evidence Strikes Back — What Works 2017

16 01 2017

Bat gantry on the A590, Cumbria, UK. Photo credit: Anna Berthinussen

Tired of living in a world where you’re constrained by inconvenient truths, irritating evidence and incommodious facts? 2016 must have been great for you. But in conservation, the fight against the ‘post-truth’ world is getting a little extra ammunition this year, as the Conservation Evidence project launches its updated book ‘What Works in Conservation 2017’.

Conservation Evidence, as many readers of this blog will know, is the brainchild of conservation heavyweight Professor Bill Sutherland, based at Cambridge University in the UK. Like all the best ideas, the Conservation Evidence project is at once staggeringly simple and breathtakingly ambitious — to list every conservation intervention ever cooked up around the world, and see how well, in the cold light of evidence, they actually worked. The project is ongoing, with new chapters of evidence added every year grouped by taxa, habitat or topic — all available for free on www.conservationevidence.com.

‘What Works in Conservation’ is a book that summarises the key findings from the Conservation Evidence website, and presents them in a simple, clear format, with links to where more information can be found on each topic. Experts (some of us still listen to them, Michael) review the evidence and score every intervention for its effectiveness, the certainty of the evidence and any harmful side effects, placing each intervention into a colour coded category from ‘beneficial’ to ‘likely to be ineffective or harmful.’ The last ‘What Works’ book included chapters on birds, bats, amphibians, soil fertility, natural pest control, some aspects of freshwater invasives and farmland conservation in Europe; new for 2017 is a chapter on forests and more species added to freshwater invasives. Read the rest of this entry »

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Tags: amphibians, bat bridges, bats, Bill Sutherland, biodiversity, birds, Cambridge, Claire Wordley, conservation evidence, farmland, invasive species, nest boxes, pest control, Soil
Categories : agriculture, alien species, amphibian, biodiversity, biowealth, birds, book, climate change, connectivity, conservation, conservation biology, fish, frog, management, planning, predator, recovery, restoration, roads

Battling the seven-headed hydra: Crassula control in Europe

8 11 2016

Hydra. Seba Albertus (1734-1765). Image from Wellsome Trust

A contribution by Claire Wordley of Conservation Evidence.

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The Australian swamp stonecrop (Crassula helmsii) is a small, unassuming looking plant with incredible resilience. It can survive both baking heat and freezing cold; it can live underwater, on the water’s surface and on land; it can survive being dried out, bleached and sprayed with hot foam; and it can regenerate from tiny fragments. Unfortunately, in the UK and elsewhere in Europe it is an invasive species, choking the oxygen from ponds and shading out other plants with knock-on effects for entire freshwater ecosystems.

Swamp stonecrop, also known as New Zealand pigmyweed, was first introduced to the UK from Tasmania in 1911 and sold in garden centres from 1927 as an ornamental pond oxygenator. Shockingly, despite being documented as an invasive plant in New Forest ponds as early as 1976, its sale in the UK was only banned in 2014. Crassula appears to be spread mostly by people, whether deliberately or accidentally; it appears to be concentrated around car parks, residential areas and areas where equipment such as fishing gear is likely to have come from an infected site. Nearly 20% of 700 UK waterbodies surveyed contained the weed. Since every 10% increase in Crassula corresponds to a 5% decrease in native vegetation, and negative effects of Crassula invasion have been documented for zooplankton, macro-invertebrates and fish, with possible negative impacts on amphibians as well, control and ideally eradication is clearly needed. But what works to destroy this superweed?

Killing the hydra

Crassula helmsii (photo by Benjamin Blondel)

Like the seven-headed hydra of legend, Crassula helmsii seems able to regenerate after even harsh treatment and being shattered into tiny pieces. Documenting clearly what works to control this beast – and what does not – is critical. This work has recently been completed by Conservation Evidence at the University of Cambridge, as part of an ongoing series on controlling freshwater invasives. The team has worked to collect all the evidence on different ways of killing Crassula, and experts have scored these for their effectiveness (or otherwise).

One of the most effective ways to knock back Crassula appears to be applying herbicides, particularly glyphosate and diquat or diquat alginate. While each of these performed well to reduce Crassula in many trials – and the use of glyphosate and diquat together led to a 98% reduction in one trial – there are concerns that while the medicine could cure the disease, it could kill the patient. One study in the New Forest noted that native plant cover fell in the treatment sites at a greater rate than in the control sites, and glyphosate appears to be toxic to amphibians. There might also be adverse effects on some bird species, although this could be due more to habitat-level changes than direct toxicity, because other birds appeared to benefit from wetlands being sprayed with glyphosate. Read the rest of this entry »

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Tags: Crassula helmsii, eradication, invasive species, pigmyweed, swamp stonecrop, weeds
Categories : alien species, Australia, conservation, science communication, water

Cartoon guide to biodiversity loss XXXIX

20 10 2016

Six more biodiversity cartoons coming to you all the way from Sweden (where I’ve been all week). See full stock of previous ‘Cartoon guide to biodiversity loss’ compendia here.

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Tags: Anthropocene, biodiversity, cats, climate change, deforestation, ecosystem services, extinction, Global warming, Holocene, invasive species, Predation, science
Categories : cartoon, conservation, environmental policy, science

Massive yet grossly underestimated global costs of invasive insects

4 10 2016

Portrait of a red imported fire ant, Solenopsis invicta. This species arrived to the southeastern United States from South America in the 1930s. Specimen from Brackenridge Field Laboratory, Austin, Texas, USA. Public domain image by Alex Wild, produced by the University of Texas "Insects Unlocked" program.

Portrait of a red imported fire ant Solenopsis invicta. This species arrived to the southeastern USA from South America in the 1930s. Specimen from Brackenridge Field Laboratory, Austin, Texas, USA. Public domain image by Alex Wild, produced by the University of Texas “Insects Unlocked” program.

As many of you already know, I spent a good deal of time in France last year basking in the hospitality of Franck Courchamp and his vibrant Systematic Ecology & Evolution lab at Université Paris-Sud. Of course, I had a wonderful time and was sad to leave in the end, but now I have some hard evidence that I wasn’t just eating cheese and visiting castles. I was actually doing some pretty cool science too.

Financed by BNP-Paribas and Agence Nationale de Recherche, the project InvaCost was designed to look at the global impact of invasive insects, including projections of range dynamics under climate change and shifting trade patterns. The first of hopefully many papers is now out.

Just published in Nature Communications, I am proud that many months of hard work by a brilliant team of ecologists, epidemiologists and economists has culminated in this article entitled Massive yet grossly underestimated costs of invasive insects, which in my opinion is the first robust analysis of its kind. Despite some previous attempts at estimating the global costs of invasive species^1-4 (which have been largely exposed as guesswork and fantasy^5-10), our paper rigorously treats the economic cost estimates and categorises them into ‘reproducible’ and ‘irreproducible’ categories.

Gypsy moth (Lymantria dispar) adult. Dimitri Geystor (France)

What we found was sobering. If we look at just ‘goods and services’ affected by invasive insects, the annual global costs run at about US$70 billion. These include agricultural, forestry and infrastructure damages, as well as many of the direct costs of clean-up and eradication, and the indirect costs of prevention. When you examine that number a little more closely and only include the ‘reproducible’ studies, the total annual costs dip to about US$25 billion, meaning that almost 65% of the costs recorded are without any real empirical support. Scary, especially considering how much credence people put on previously published global ‘estimates’ (for example, see some citation statistics here).

Formosan subterranean termite Coptotermes formosanus by Scott Bauer, US Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service

There’s a great example to illustrate this. If you take it at face value, the most expensive invasive insect in the world is the Formosan subterranean termite Coptotermes formosanus estimated at US$30.2 billion/yr globally. However, that irreproducible estimate is based on a single non-sourced value of US$2.2 billion per year for the USA, a personal communication supporting a ratio of 1:4 of control:repair costs in a single US city (New Orleans), and an unvalidated assumption that the US costs represent 50% of the global total.

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Tags: costs, Economics, ecosystem services, goods and services, human health, insects, invasion biology, invasive species
Categories : agriculture, Asia, Canada, Central America, climate change, conservation, ecosystem services, environmental policy, invasive species, investment, management, pollination, USA

Help Hawaii’s hyper-threatened birds

6 01 2015

Puaiohi or small Kaua’i thrush. Photo by Lucas Behnke

You wouldn’t want to be a bird in Hawaii. There are more avian species threatened with extinction there than anywhere else in the USA. After humans arrived, some 70+ species have become extinct, and 31 are listed as threatened with extinction. In addition, 43% of 157 species are not native; among land birds, 69% are introduced species.

My friend, Cali Crampton asked me to promote their new crowdfunding project to reduce the threat of feral rats on Hawaiian birds. Please help if you can.

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The Kaua‘i Forest Bird Recovery Project, a collaborative project of the Hawaii Department of Land and Natural Resources, Division of Forestry and Wildlife, the University of Hawaii Pacific Cooperative Studies Unit, and Garden Island Research and Development, has announced the launch of a crowdfunding and outreach campaign to generate support for protecting the native birds of Kaua’i by controlling rats with humane, self-resetting rat traps.

The campaign, named “Birds, not Rats!” runs through to 31 January 2015, with goals of increasing awareness of the threats that rats pose to birds and native ecosystems, and raising at least $10,000 for rat control through many small, individual donations.

Hawai’i is at the epicentre of the current global extinction crisis. Of the original 130+ native Hawaiian bird species, many have been lost forever, and only 11 are not yet endangered. Today, Kaua’i is home to eight native forest bird species, three of which are federally listed as endangered: the puaiohi or small Kaua’i thrush, the akeke’e or Kaua’i akepa, and the akikiki or Kaua’i creeper. Populations of these birds have plummeted as much as 90% in the last five years; the akikiki and the puaiohi now number fewer than 500 individuals, and the akeke’e numbers fewer than 1000 individuals. The Kaua’i Forest Bird Recovery Project’s goal is to reverse these declines. Read the rest of this entry »

Comments : 6 Comments »
Tags: birds, crowdfunding, Hawai'i, invasive species, invasives, Kaua'i, Kaua'i Forest Bird Recovery Project, rats
Categories : alien species, birds, conservation, conservation biology, decline, endemic, endemism, extinction, invasive species, predator

InvaCost – estimating the economic damage of invasive insects

7 11 2014

This is a blosh (rehash of someone else’s blog post) of Franck Courchamp‘s posts on an exciting new initiative of which I am excited to be a part. Incidentally, Franck’s spending the week here in Adelaide.

Don’t forgot to vote for the project to receive 50 000 € public-communication grant!

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Climate change will make winters milder and habitats climatically more suitable year-round for cold-blooded animals like insects, but there are many questions remaining regarding whether such insects will be able to invade other regions as the climate shifts. There are many nasty bugs out there.

For example, the Asian predatory wasp is an invasive hornet in Europe that butchers pollinating insects, especially bees, thereby affecting the production of many wild and cultivated plants. I hope that we all remember what Einstein said about pollinators:

If bees were to disappear, humans will disappear within a few years.

(we all should remember that because it’s one of the few things he said that most of us understood). The highly invasive red fire ant is feared for its impacts on biodiversity, agriculture and cattle breeding, and the thousands of anaphylactic shocks inflicted to people by painful stings every year (with hundreds of deaths). Between the USA and Australia, over US$10 billion is spent yearly on the control of this insect alone. Tiger mosquitoes are vectors of pathogens that cause dengue fever, chikungunya virus and of about 30 other viruses. We could go on.

Most of these nasty creatures are now unable to colonise northern regions of Europe or America, or southern regions of Australia, for example, because they cannot survive cold temperatures. But how will this change? Where, when and which species will invade with rising temperatures? What will be the costs in terms of species loss? In terms of agricultural or forestry loss? In terms of diseases to cattle, domestic animals and humans? What will be the death toll if insects that are vectors of malaria can establish in new, highly populated areas?

We’ve proposed to study these and others from a list of 20 of the worst invasive insect species worldwide, and we got selected (i.e., financed!) by the Fondation BNP Paribas. In addition, the Fondation BNP Paribas has selected five scientific programmes on climate change and will give 50,000 € (that’s US$62,000) to the one selected by the public, for a communication project on their scientific programme. This is why we need you to vote for our project: InvaCost. Read the rest of this entry »

Comments : 3 Comments »
Tags: BNP Paribas, Citizen science, climate change, Economics, Franck Courchamp, Global warming, insects, InvaCost, invasive species
Categories : agriculture, alien species, bioclimatic envelope, cattle, citizen science, climate change, climate shift, conservation, disease, ecology, economics, ecosystem, ecosystem services, environmental economics, Europe, food, health, invasive species, management, research, science, science communication

It’s not all about cats

20 10 2014

If you follow any of the environment news in Australia, you will most certainly have seen a lot about feral cats in the last few weeks. I’ve come across dozens of articles in the last week alone talking about the horrendous toll feral cats have had on Australian wildlife since European arrival. In principle, this is a good thing because finally Australians are groggily waking to the fact that our house moggies and their descendants have royally buggered our biodiversity. As a result, we have the highest mammal extinction rate of any country.

But I argue that the newfound enthusiasm for killing anything feline is being peddled mainly as a distraction from bigger environmental issues and to camouflage the complete incompetence of the current government and their all-out war on the environment.

Call me cynical, but when I read headlines like “Australia aims to end extinction of native wildlife by 2020” and Environment Minister Hunt’s recent speech that he has “… set a goal of ending the loss of mammal species by 2020“, I get more than just a little sick to the stomach.

What a preposterous load of shite. Moreover, what a blatant wool-pulling-over-the-eyes public stunt. Read the rest of this entry »

Comments : 6 Comments »
Tags: Australia, cats, dingoes, feral animals, feral species, foxes, invasive species, mesopredator release, poison, wildlife management
Categories : alien species, anthropocene, Australia, biodiversity, cat, conservation, conservation biology, decline, deforestation, ecosystem, ecosystem function, environmental policy, environmental science, extinction, extinction debt, fox, fragmentation, habitat loss, harvest, invasive species, logging, mammal, management, propaganda, research

Cartoon guide to biodiversity loss XXI

4 10 2013

Interim post following some mind- and body-stressing international travel. I present another 6 biodiversity cartoons (see full stock of previous ‘Cartoon guide to biodiversity loss’ compendia here).

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