Comparison of Taxon‐Specific and Taxon‐Generic Risk Screening Tools to Identify Potentially Invasive Non‐native Fishes in the River Neretva Catchment (Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia)

Abstract

The Freshwater Fish Invasiveness Screening Kit (FISK) v2 and Aquatic Species Invasiveness Screening Kit (AS‐ISK) risk identification screening tools were used to assess the invasiveness potential of 24 non‐native (NNS) freshwater fish species in the River Neretva catchment (Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia), a risk assessment (RA) area that is an important Mediterranean hotspot for fish endemism. The two assessors assigned similar scores for the invasiveness potential of the NN fishes, and both screening tools successfully distinguished invasive from non‐invasive species. Mean calibrated threshold scores were 10.25 for FISK and 10.00 for AS‐ISK, with the latter increasing to 12.62 when questions that assess the likely impact of predicted future climate conditions on the RA were taken into consideration. These relatively low threshold values are characteristic of areas with an elevated number of translocated species and suggest that NN fishes pose a considerable threat to native species and ecosystems. FISK ranked 50.0–62.6% of the species as being of ‘high risk’ compared with 58.4–59.3% using AS‐ISK. The highest scores (‘very high risk’) were attributed to gibel carp Carassius gibelio (Bloch, 1782) and pikeperch Sander lucioperca (Linnaeus, 1758). The generic screening tool for aquatic species (AS‐ISK) provided similar risk rankings to its predecessor, FISK, as regards invasiveness potential. For this reason, it is likely to be an effective tool for evaluating the potential invasion risk of NNS freshwater fishes for other RA areas in the Balkans. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

A Risk Screening Study on the Potential Invasiveness of Lessepsian fishes in the South-Eastern Coasts of Anatolia

“…Notably, the species assessed, despite having been often recorded in the RA area, are not yet naturalised therein. Following previous AS-ISK applications on fishes (Glamuzina et al 2017, Li et al 2017, Tarkan et al 2017a, to achieve an objective a priori categorisation of the species assessed in terms of their perceived invasiveness (i.e., invasive or non-invasive), which is a requirement for ROC analysis (see Statistical analysis), each species' categorisation was initially derived from two independent sources, namely the Invasive Species Specialist Group database (ISSG ** ) and FishBase (Froese and Pauly 2018). However, the initial classification was regarded as unsatisfactory for the purposes of the presently reported study as all the Lessepsian fishes assessed are currently listed in FishBase or ISSG either as 'harmless' (hence, carrying no risk of invasiveness) or 'not yet evaluated', and none of them is included in the Global Invasiveness Species Database (GISD *** ).…”

Occurrence of alien spirlin (Alburnoidessp.) in the Neretva river basin

“…This indicates that it is an introduced species. There are no data on the possible time of introduction, but as it was not mentioned by Glamuzina et al (2013Glamuzina et al ( , 2017, it is presumably a case of rather recent introduction. The cytochrome b haplotypes of the specimens from the Neretva river basin are identical or very similar to those from the Vrbas and Bosna river basins in Bosnia and Herzegovina (Fig.…”

“…is the 32 nd alien species recorded in the Neretva river basin (see Tab. S2) (Glamuzina et al, 2013(Glamuzina et al, , 2017Dulčić et al, 2017;Tutman et al, 2017b;Šukalo et al, 2018). Although not all alien species adapted successfully (Glamuzina et al, 2017), the presence of such a high number of alien species, which approaches the number of native freshwater species ever recorded in the basin (34-see Tab.…”

“…Unfortunately, also alien species have been recorded from this river basin, and their number is as high as 31 (Tab. S2) (Glamuzina et al, 2013(Glamuzina et al, , 2017Dulčić et al, 2017;Tutman et al, 2017b;Šukalo et al, 2018). The majority of the introduced species are considered to have a strong negative impact on the native fishes (Glamuzina et al, 2017).…”

The first record of non-native largemouth black bass, Micropterus salmoides (Actinopterygii: Perciformes: Centrarchidae), in Bosnia and Herzegovina

“…Currently, there are approximately 21 non-native fish species recorded in freshwaters of Bosnia and Herzegovina (Tutman and Hamzić, unpublished data), and the list is still expanding. These species experienced different fates; some of them have established self-sustaining populations, including pumpkinseed, Lepomis gibbosus (Linnaeus, 1758); topmouth gudgeon, Pseudorasbora parva (Temminck et Schlegel, 1846); and sunbleak, Leucaspius delineatus (Heckel, 1843) (see Sofradžija 2009), while some other fish species experienced different scenarios (Glamuzina et al 2017).…”