Impacts and Management of Invasive Species in the UK Overseas Territories
The human-mediated spread of invasive, non-native species (INNS) is a major driver of biodiversity loss and habitat degradation worldwide, threatening ecosystems, food security and sustainable development goals. The impacts of INNS have been particularly
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oduction For centuries, humans have transported plants, animals and other organisms beyond their natural ranges, either deliberately or unintentionally, as trade and colonisation have expanded around the globe. With ever increasing globalisation and the growth in international travel over recent decades, the potential pathways for the spread of biological agents have continued to multiply (Early, Bradley, Dukes, et al., 2016). Not all introduced species cause problems in their new locations and indeed some generate considerable benefits for societies and economies, including in agriculture, horticulture and forestry. However, those that become established and proliferate in unintended ways can cause substantial, and often irreversible, ecological damage to the environments that receive them (Blackburn et al., 2011). These ‘invasive, non- native species’ (INNS) are recognised as one of the principle drivers of biodiversity loss worldwide (Díaz et al., 2019) and pose major threats to food security, human livelihoods and ecosystem service provision (Paini et al., 2016; Reaser, Meyerson, Cronk, et al., 2007). Many of the most pervasive INNS share a common set of attributes, such as high fecundity and growth rates and being well-adapted to surviving in disturbed or human-modified environments (Rejmanek & Richardson, 1996; Van Kleunen et al., 2010; Jelbert et al., 2019); nevertheless, it is often difficult to predict which species will establish themselves in a given environment (Early et al., 2016; Mack et al., 2000).
N. Weber (*) · S. Weber Centre for Ecology and Conservation, College of Life and Evironmental Sciences, University of Exeter, Penryn Campus, Cornwall, UK e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 S. J. Walsh et al. (eds.), Land Cover and Land Use Change on Islands, Social and Ecological Interactions in the Galapagos Islands, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43973-6_13
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The impacts of INNS have been particularly acute on islands where they threaten native species through a combination of competition, predation, habitat modification, disease transmission, disruption of ecosystem functions and changing trophic dynamics (Doherty, Glen, Nimmo, Ritchie, & Dickman, 2016; Simberloff, Martin, Genovesi, et al., 2013). A number of characteristics of islands leave them vulnerable to this kind of biological invasion; many have relatively simplistic ecosystems with limited functional diversity, leaving niches open for colonisation (Moser, Lenzner, Weigelt, et al., 2018). Insular species and communities have also often evolved in isolation over long periods of time leading to “ecological naivety” (or “island tameness”; Carthey & Banks, 2014; Cooper, Pyron, & Garland, 2014) and placing them at competitive disadvantage to vigorous, exotic competitors released from the constraints of pests, predators and diseases that regulate their populations in their native ranges (e.g. Funk & Throop, 2010). Another consequence of isolation is that islands often support high
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