Biological invasions are responsible for tremendous impacts globally, including huge economic losses and management expenditures. Efficiently mitigating this major driver of global change requires the improvement of public awareness and policy regarding its substantial impacts on our socio-ecosystems. One option to contribute to this overall objective is to inform people on the economic costs linked to these impacts; however, until now, a reliable synthesis of invasion costs has never been produced at a global scale. Here, we introduce InvaCost as the most up-to-date, comprehensive, harmonised and robust compilation and description of economic cost estimates associated with biological invasions worldwide. We have developed a systematic, standardised methodology to collect information from peer-reviewed articles and grey literature, while ensuring data validity and method repeatability for further transparent inputs. Our manuscript presents the methodology and tools used to build and populate this living and publicly available database. InvaCost provides an essential basis (2419 cost estimates currently compiled) for worldwide research, management efforts and, ultimately, for data-driven and evidence-based policymaking.

AimLarge-scale datasets are becoming increasingly available for macroecological research from different disciplines. However, learning their specific extraction and analytical requirements can become prohibitively time-consuming for researchers. We argue that this issue can be tackled with the provision of methodological frameworks published in open-source software. We illustrate this solution with the invacost R package, an open-source software designed to query and analyse the global database on reported economic costs of invasive alien species, InvaCost.InnovationsFirst, the invacost package provides updates of this dynamic database directly in the analytical environment R. Second, it helps understand the nature of economic cost data for invasive species, their harmonisation process, and the inherent biases associated with such data. Third, it readily provides complementary methods to query and analyse the costs of invasive species at the global scale, all the while accounting for econometric statistical issues.Main conclusionsThis tool will be useful for scientists working on invasive alien species, by (i) facilitating access and use to this multi-disciplinary data resource and (ii) providing a standard procedure which will facilitate reproducibility and comparability of studies, one of the major critics of this topic until now. We discuss how the development of this R package was designed as an enforcement of general recommendations for transparency, reproducibility and comparability of science in the era of big data in ecology.

International audienc

International audienceCorrigendum to “Biodiversity offset markets: What are they really? An empirical approach to wetland mitigation banking” [ECOLEC 110 (2015) 81–88]Ecological Economics, Volume 114, June 2015, Page 24

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

1. The reported costs of invasive alien species from the global database InvaCost are heterogeneous and cover different spatio-temporal scales. A standard procedure for aggregating invasive species cost estimates is necessary to ensure the repeatability and comparativeness of studies.2. We introduce here the invacost r package, an open-source software designed to query and analyse the InvaCost database. We illustrate this package and its framework with cost data associated with invasive alien invertebrates.3. First, the invacost package provides updates of this dynamic database directly in the analytical environment R. Second, it helps understand the heterogeneous nature of monetary cost data for invasive species, processes to harmonize the data and the inherent biases associated with such data. Third, it readily provides complementary methods to investigate the costs of invasive species at different scales, all the while accounting for econometric statistical issues. 4. This tool will be useful for scientists working on invasive alien species, by (a) facilitating access to and use of this multi-disciplinary data resource and (b) providing a standard procedure which will facilitate reproducibility and comparability among studies, one of the major critics of this topic until now. It should facilitate further interdisciplinary works including economists and invasion ecology researchers. K E Y W O R D S biological invasions, drivers of change in biodiversity, economic costs, economic impacts, ecosystem services, invasive alien species | 1931 Methods in Ecology and Evoluঞon Leroy et aL.