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Predicting plant invaders in the Mediterranean through a weed risk assessment system

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Abstract

Risk assessment schemes have been developed to identify potential invasive species, prevent their spread and reduce their damaging effects. One of the most promising tools for detecting plant invaders is the weed risk assessment (WRA) scheme developed for Australia. Our study explores whether the Australian WRA can satisfactorily predict the invasion status of alien plants in the Mediterranean Basin by screening 100 invasive and 97 casual species in Spain. Furthermore, we analysed whether the factors taken into account in the WRA are linked to invasion likelihood (i.e., invasion status) or to impacts. The outcome was that 94% of the invasive species were rejected, 50% of the casual species were rejected and 29% of them required further evaluation. The accuracy for casuals is lower than in other studies that have tested non-invasive (i.e., casuals or non-escaped) alien species. We postulate that low accuracy for casual species could result from: (1) an incorrect “a priori” expert classification of the species status, (2) a high weight of the WRA scores given to potential impacts, and (3) casual species being prone to becoming invasive when reaching a minimum residence time threshold. Therefore, the WRA could be working as a precaution early-warning system to identify casual species with potential to become invasive.

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Acknowledgments

We thank I. Kühn and P. Pyšek for providing the WRA excel application; and C. Daehler and three anonymous reviewers for comments on an early version of the manuscript. This study has been partially financed by the 6th Framework Programme of the European Commission projects ALARM (Assessing large-scale environmental risks for biodiversity with tested methods. GOCE-CT-2003-506675; http://www.alarmproject.net/alarm/) and DAISIE (Delivering alien invasive species inventories for Europe. SSPI-CT-2003-511202; http://www.europe-aliens.org/) and the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación CONSOLIDER project MONTES (Spanish woodlands and global change: threats and opportunities. CSD2008-00040).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. CREAF (Centre for Ecological Research and Forestry Applications), Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, E-08193, Bellaterra, Catalonia, Spain

    Núria Gassó & Corina Basnou

  2. Estación Biológica de Doñana-Centro Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (EDB-CSIC), Avda. Américo Vespucio s/n, Sevilla, E-41092, Spain

    Montserrat Vilà

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  1. Núria Gassó
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  2. Corina Basnou
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  3. Montserrat Vilà
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Correspondence to Núria Gassó.

Appendices

Appendix 1

See Table 3.

Table 3 Table of correspondences between the adapted questions from the Australian weed risk assessment system of Pheloung et al. (1999) (WRA) to our study, and abbreviations used in our analysis
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Appendix 2

See Table 4.

Table 4 Species used to test if the Australian weed risk assessment system (WRA) of Pheloung et al. (1999) was suitable to predict (A) 100 invasive (A) and (B) 97 casual species in Spain. The final WRA score is given
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Gassó, N., Basnou, C. & Vilà, M. Predicting plant invaders in the Mediterranean through a weed risk assessment system. Biol Invasions 12, 463–476 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10530-009-9451-2

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