Scenarios for biological invasions

The main objective is to assess the consequences of different levels of implementation of the European Union Regulation on IAS (Regulation No. 1143/2014, EU 2014). This regulation has become the key policy tool in coordinating and improving the efforts of EU member states to combat IAS. EU member states differ in policies and regulatory histories, risk assessment tools and data availability (Sonigo et al. 2011), but the ramification this heterogeneity has on IAS is unknown (Tollington et al. 2017). We will examine regulations, management capacities and other socio-ecological factors (e.g. environmental heterogeneity, length of common borders) across EU member states, integrate these into a spatially-explicit model along with human vector movement (i.e. the primary mechanism of alien species transport and dispersion; Leung et al. 2004; Della Venezia et al. 2018).

We will statistically relate these socio-ecological constraints and human-mediated pathways of spread to the patterns of alien species establishment and impact across the EU (in collaboration with WPs II and III). We will focus on the IAS of EU concern (currently 49 species) as listed in the EU regulation on IAS (EU 2014). Our analyses will allow us to unravel the effect that differing policy implementation and capacities may have on the studied IAS in each member state. Further, since member states are interconnected by transportation and trade in goods, we will also parse out their ramifications for other member states (i.e. what is the effect of a “weak link”). We will also use this model to simulate the effect of alternative policies and capacities, based on a series of qualitative scenarios for managing IAS in Europe constructed by applying the methodology of scenario-planning following the premises of the conceptual framework. Such an integrated approach will give a scientific basis to quantitatively examine the consequences of the differing degrees of policy implementation across the EU.