Insights from modeling studies on how climate change affects invasive alien species geography

Abstract

Climate change and biological invasions are threatening biodiversity and ecosystem services worldwide. It has now been widely acknowledged that climate change will affect biological invasions. A large number of studies have investigated predicted shifts and other changes in the geographic ranges of invasive alien species related to climate change using modeling approaches. Yet these studies have provided contradictory evidence, and no consensus has been reached. We conducted a systematic review of 423 modeling case studies included in 71 publications that have examined the predicted effects of climate change on those species. We differentiate the approaches used in these studies and synthesize their main results. Our results reaffirm the major role of climate change as a driver of invasive alien species distribution in the future. We found biases in the literature both regarding the taxa, toward plants and invertebrates, and the areas of the planet investigated. Despite these biases, we found for the plants and vertebrates studied that climate change will more frequently contribute to a decrease in species range size than an increase in the overall area occupied. This is largely due to oceans preventing terrestrial invaders from spreading poleward. In contrast, we found that the ranges of invertebrates and pathogens studied are more likely to increase following climate change. An important caveat to these findings is that researchers have rarely considered the effects of climate change on transport, introduction success, or the resulting impacts. We recommend closing these research gaps, and propose additional avenues for future investigations, as well as opportunities and challenges for managing invasions under climate change.

Potential Risks of Plant Invasions in Protected Areas of Sri Lanka under Climate Change with Special Reference to Threatened Vertebrates

“…Though poorly understood, climate change has the capacity to change the distribution of invasive species in geographic areas, as many invasive species have broad climatic tolerances [14]. Additionally, the frequency of extreme climatic events (i.e., floods and droughts) will likely increase under climate change, and this may influence the increased invasion through several mechanisms, such as transporting propagules and reducing the resistance of native species to invasions [14,55]. The results also suggested that the intensity of invasion risk is lower in PAs as compared to outside PAs.…”

“…Even though species distribution models are frequently used and vital tools, there are some common limitations, and due to the level of uncertainty associated with modeling techniques, the general circulation models (GCMs) and representative concentration pathways (RCPs) used may result in serious implications for model performance [7,14,81]. We have discussed the general limitations of MaxEnt models and the approaches used to overcome them by Kariyawasam et al [29], with particular attention paid to the uncertainty associated with the model building, spatial scales, and selection of data.…”

“…Many developing island nations in tropical regions are highly vulnerable to climate change and its associated impacts (i.e., impacts from IAS), due to their small size and fragile ecosystems [8][9][10][11]. Climate change is expected to influence the introduction and spread of IAS in the future [12][13][14]. Furthermore, IAS are considered to be the second leading factor (i.e., after habitat destruction) that endangers biodiversity [15,16].…”

High‐resolution biomonitoring of plant pathogens and plant species using metabarcoding of pollen pellet contents collected from a honey bee hive

“…Such approaches address the need for additional monitoring methods for ecological damage mitigation, much of which is caused by either fungi or oomycetes (Carris, Little, & Stiles, 2012;Fry & Grunwald, 2010;Kamoun et al, 2015;Knogge, 1996). Exotic or invasive pathogens impacting Canadian natural and agricultural resources, such as forests and crops, are also increasing at an alarming rate because of anthropogenic activities including international trade and climate change (Allen & Humble, 2002;Bellard, Jeschke, Leroy, & Mace, 2018;Bilodeau, Koike, Uribe, & Martin, 2012;Hulme, 2009;Mecteau, Joseph, & Tweddell, 2002;Roe et al, 2018;Vettraino et al, 2015).…”

Assessing impacts of climate change on Campanula yaltirikii H.Duman (Campanulaceae), a critically endangered endemic species in Turkey

“…ENMs associate known species occurrence records with environmental variables that can affect the species' distributions and provide information about suitable environments for the species (Pearson, 2007). These models are used for estimating potential species' distributions (Gülsoy et al, 2017;Jazwa et al, 2018), predicting species' invasion (Vetter et al, 2018), projecting potential impacts of climate change (Bellard et al, 2018), exploring speciation mechanisms (Gutierrez et al, 2014), etc. However, comparatively few ENMs have been used for rare and endangered plant species with small population sizes (de Siqueira et al, 2009).…”