Hanno Seebens

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• Dr. rer. nat.
• Heisenberg Group Leader at Justus Liebig University Giessen

Although research on human-mediated exchanges of species has substantially intensified during the last centuries, we know surprisingly little about temporal dynamics of alien species accumulations across regions and taxa. Using a novel database of 45,813 first records of 16,926 established alien species, we show that the annual rate of first record...

Significance Predicting the arrival of alien species remains a big challenge, which is assumed to be a consequence of the complexity of the invasion process. Here, we demonstrate that spreading of alien marine species can be predicted by a simple model using only global shipping intensities, environmental variables, and species occurrence data. We...

It has been argued that globalization in human-mediated dispersal of species breaks down biogeographic boundaries, yet empirical tests are still missing. We used data on native and alien ranges of terrestrial gastropods to analyze dissimilarities in species composition among 56 globally distributed regions. We found that native ranges confirm the t...

The rate of biological invasions has strongly increased during the last decades, mostly due to the accelerated spread of species by increasing global trade and transport. Here, we combine the network of global cargo ship movements with port environmental conditions and biogeography to quantify the probability of new primary invasions through the re...

Substantial progress has been made in understanding how pathways underlie and mediate biological invasions. However, key features of their role in invasions remain poorly understood, available knowledge is widely scattered, and major frontiers in research and management are insufficiently characterized. We review the state of the art, highlight rec...

The diverse biotas of the world’s mountains face a challenging future due to increasing threats like climate change, land-use change, and biological invasions, the last being particularly understudied in these regions. Here we compile occurrence records for 717 alien vertebrate species distributed in 2984 mountains worldwide. We analyze their distr...

Biological invasions are a major threat to biodiversity, ecosystem functioning and nature's contributions to people worldwide. However, the effectiveness of invasive alien species (IAS) management measures and the progress toward achieving biodiversity targets remain uncertain due to limited and nonuniform data availability. Management success is u...

Aim Cryptic invasions are an understudied phenomenon among species invasions, especially in freshwater invertebrates. We study the gastropod family Physidae, including the global invaders Physella acuta and several enigmatic Stenophysa species, their phylogenetic relationships and the presence of native species among African Physidae. We infer dist...

1. Invasive alien species pose a growing threat to global biodiversity, necessitating evidence-based prevention measures. Species distribution models (SDMs) are a useful tool for quantifying the potential distribution of alien species in non-native areas and deriving blacklists based on establishment risk. Yet, uncertainties due to different modell...

Biological invasions pose significant threats to biodiversity, while impacting ecosystem services, human health, and cultural heritage. Despite these far-ranging effects, their impacts are generally underappreciated by both the public and policymakers, resulting in insufficient management and inadequate conservation outcomes. Recognizing the gap in...

The ecological impact of non‐native species arises from their establishment in local assemblages. However, the rates of non‐native spread in new regions and their determinants have not been comprehensively studied. Here, we combined global databases documenting the occurrence of non‐native species and residence of non‐native birds, mammals, and vas...

Although invasive alien species have long been recognized as a major threat to nature and people, until now there has been no comprehensive global review of the status, trends, drivers, impacts, management and governance challenges of biological invasions. The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES)...

Biological invasions are a growing challenge in a highly interconnected and globalized world, leading to the loss of native biodiversity. Indigenous peoples’ lands (IPLs) play a vital role in biodiversity conservation through activities such as land stewardship and management practices. Similar to protected areas, they are also often remote, with f...

Aim Invasions of non‐native insects can have substantial impacts on agriculture, forestry, human health and biodiversity with considerable economic and environmental consequences. To understand the causes of these invasions, it is important to quantify the relative influence of principal drivers such as international imports and climatic effects....

Monitoring the extent to which invasive alien species (IAS) negatively impact the environment is crucial for understanding and mitigating biologi- cal invasions. Indeed, such information is vital for achieving Target 6 of the Kunming–Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. However, to-date indi- cators for tracking the environmental impacts of IAS...

Future dynamics of biological invasions are highly uncertain because they depend on multiple social–ecological drivers. We used a scenario‐based approach to explore potential management options for invasive species in Europe. During two workshops involving a multidisciplinary team of experts, we developed a management strategy arranged into 19 goal...

On 4 September 2023, the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) released the most comprehensive global synthesis of the current knowledge on the biological invasion process and the impacts of invasive alien species, i.e., the Thematic Assessment Report on Invasive Alien Species and their Control (he...

Aim Spreading infectious diseases associated with introduced pathogens can have devastating effects on native biota and human livelihoods. We analyse the global distribution of 100 major alien fungal and oomycete pathogens with substantial socio‐economic and environmental impacts and examine their taxonomy, ecological characteristics, temporal accu...

Invasive alien species are one of the major threats to global biodiversity, ecosystem integrity, nature's contributions to people and human health. While scenarios about potential future developments have been available for other global change drivers for quite some time, we largely lack an understanding of how biological invasions might unfold in...

Summary for Policymakers of the Thematic Assessment Report on Invasive Alien Species and their Control of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services.

At least 39,215 alien species and more than 37,000 established alien species have been recorded worldwide and occurrences of established alien species have been reported from all countries and all ecosystems globally. The number of established alien species has risen at continuously accelerating rates for centuries, recently reaching the highest to...

While it is increasingly well understood how plants and animals spread around the world, and how they diversify and occupy new niches, such knowledge is fairly limited for fungi and oomycetes. As is true for animals and plants, many plant pathogenic fungi have been spread anthropogenically, but, in contrast to them, only rarely as a deliberate intr...

Aims Spatio‐temporal processes play a key role in ecology, from genes to large‐scale macroecological and biogeographical processes. Existing methods studying such spatio‐temporally structured data either simplify the dynamic structure or the complex interactions of ecological drivers. The aim of this paper is to present a generic method for ecologi...

Effective biodiversity management and policy decisions require timely access to accurate and reliable information on biodiversity status, trends, and threats. However, the process of data cleaning, aggregation, and analysis is often time-consuming, convoluted, laborious, and irreproducible. Biodiversity monitoring across large areas faces challenge...

Aim: The relationship between native and naturalized alien species has been widely studied, particularly across large geographic scales. However, our knowledge of the spatial and temporal variations of their relationships is still limited, particularly for remote oceanic islands such as those of the southeast Pacific and across islands and archipel...

Shifts between native and alien climatic niches pose a major challenge for predicting biological invasions. This is particularly true for insular species because geophysical barriers could constrain the realization of their fundamental niches, which may lead to underestimates of their invasion potential. To investigate this idea, we estimated the f...

Aim Investigating major freshwater fish flows (translocations) between biogeographic regions and their temporal dynamics and also quantifying spatial patterns and temporal changes in the array of introduced species, and the emergence and distance between major donor and recipient regions. Location Global. Time Period 1800–2020. Major Taxa Studie...

Rates of biological invasion have increased over recent centuries and are expected to increase in the future. Whereas increasing rates of non-native species incursions across realms, taxonomic groups, and regions are well-reported, trends in abundances within these contexts have lacked analysis due to a paucity of long-term data at large spatiotemp...

While the regional distribution of non-native species is increasingly well documented for some taxa, global analyses of non-native species in local assemblages are still missing. Here, we use a worldwide collection of assemblages from five taxa - ants, birds, mammals, spiders and vascular plants - to assess whether the incidence, frequency and prop...

Aim: Spatio-temporal processes play a key role in ecology, from genes to large-scale macroecological and biogeographical processes. Existing methods studying such spatio-temporally structured data either simplify the dynamic structure or the complex interactions of ecological drivers. This paper aims to present a generic method for ecological resea...

Our ability to predict the spread of alien species is largely based on knowledge of previous invasion dynamics of individual species. However, in view of the large and growing number of alien species, understanding universal spread patterns common among taxa but specific to regions would considerably improve our ability to predict future dynamics o...

The redistribution of alien species across the globe accelerated with the start of European colonialism. European powers were responsible for the deliberate and accidental transportation, introduction and establishment of alien species throughout their occupied territories and the metropolitan state. Here, we show that these activities left a lasti...

1. Invasive alien species are one of the major threats to global biodiversity, ecosystem integrity, natures contribution to people and human health. While scenarios about potential future developments have been available for other global change drivers for quite some time, we largely lack an understanding of how biological invasions might unfold in...

Aim Biological invasions are a major threat to biodiversity in aquatic and terrestrial habitats. Insects represent an important group of species in freshwater and terrestrial habitats, and they constitute a large proportion of non‐native species. However, while many non‐native insects are known from terrestrial ecosystems, they appear to be less re...

Future dynamics of biological invasions are highly uncertain because they depend on multiple environmental, societal and socio-economic drivers. We adopted a qualitative scenario approach to explore the future of invasive alien species (IAS) in Europe and created an overall strategy for their management that considers different plausible future dev...

Unlabelled: The extent and impacts of biological invasions on biodiversity are largely shaped by an array of socio-economic and environmental factors, which exhibit high variation among countries. Yet, a global analysis of how these factors vary across countries is currently lacking. Here, we investigate how five broad, country-specific socio-econ...

Information about occurrences of alien species is often provided in so-called checklists, which represents lists of reported alien species in a region. In many cases, available checklists cover whole countries, which is too coarse for many analyses and limits capabilities of assessing status and trends of biological invasions. Information about poi...

The introduction and further spread of many alien species have been a result of trade and transport. Consequently, alien species are often found close to traffic infrastructure and urban areas. To contain and manage the spread of alien species, it is essential to identify and predict major routes of spread, which cannot be obtained by applying comm...

Aim Biological invasions are a major threat to biodiversity in both aquatic and terrestrial habitats. Insects represent an important group of species in freshwater and terrestrial habitats, and they constitute a large proportion of non-native species. However, while many non-native insects are known from terrestrial ecosystems, it remains unclear h...

Unravelling the history of range shifts is key for understanding past, current and future species distributions. Anthropogenic transport of species alters natural dispersal patterns and directly affects population connectivity. Studies have suggested that high levels of anthropogenic transport homogenize patterns of genetic differentiation and blur...

Humans have exchanged plant species beyond their native borders since millennia. The pathways of exchange and their relative importance have differed among regions, times and species. Here, we review the temporal developments of pathways of alien plant species introductions and how these relate to trends in alien plant species richness at a global...

Supplementary information for Yang et al. The global loss of floristic uniqueness

Regional species assemblages have been shaped by colonization, speciation and extinction over millions of years. Humans have altered biogeography by introducing species to new ranges. However, an analysis of how strongly naturalized plant species (i.e. alien plants that have established self-sustaining populations) affect the taxonomic and phylogen...

Aim Our current understanding of the causes of global extinction risk is mostly informed by the expert knowledge‐based “threats classification scheme” of the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. Studies based on this dataset came to different conclusions about the relative importance of threats to species, depending on which taxonomic groups and le...

Most published papers in ecology come from a handful of countries, and invasion science as an ecological subdiscipline is no exception. Based on the country of corresponding authors, we analyzed patterns in submissions, reviews, and publications in the journal Biological Invasions from its first issue in 1999 to 2020. Regionally, North America, Eur...

The editorial board of this journal, Biological Invasions, aims to publish research that informs understanding of the patterns and processes of invasions and discussion of relevant policy and conservation issues related to controlling invasions. Because the scope of the journal's interests is global, building an editorial board that represents the...

Scenario analysis has emerged as a key tool to analyze complex and uncertain future socio-ecological developments. However, currently existing global scenarios (narratives of how the world may develop) have neglected biological invasions, a major threat to biodiversity and the economy. Here, we use a novel participatory process to develop a diverse...

Invasive alien species are repeatedly shown to be amongst the top threats to biodiversity globally. Robust indicators for measuring the status and trends of biological invasions are lacking, but essential for monitoring biological invasions and the effectiveness of interventions. Here, we formulate and demonstrate three such indicators that capture...

As part of national biosecurity programs, cargo imports, passenger baggage, and international mail are inspected at ports of entry to verify compliance with phytosanitary regulations and to intercept potentially damaging nonnative species to prevent their introduction. Detection of organisms during inspections may also provide crucial information a...

Aim The concept of “island disharmony” has been widely applied to describe the systematic over- and under-representation of taxa on islands compared to mainland regions. Here, we explore an extension of that concept to biological invasions. We compare biogeographical patterns in native and non-native beetle (Coleoptera) assemblages from around the...

The Pacific Region has the highest density of naturalised plant species worldwide, which makes it an important area for research on the ecology, evolution and biogeography of biological invasions. While different data sources on naturalised plant species exist for the Pacific, there is no taxonomically and spatially harmonised database available fo...

Aim The number of alien species has been increasing for centuries world‐wide, but temporal changes in the dynamics of their inter‐regional spread remain unclear. Here, we analyse changes in the rate and extent of inter‐regional spread of alien species over time and how these dynamics vary among major taxonomic groups. Location Global. Time period...

Significance Invasive alien species pose major threats to biodiversity and ecosystems. However, identifying drivers of invasion success has been challenging, in part because species can achieve invasiveness in different ways, each corresponding to different aspects of demographics and distribution. Employing a multidimensional perspective of invasi...

Aim: The Pacific exhibits an exceptional number of naturalized plant species, but the drivers of this high diversity and the associated compositional patterns remain largely unknown. Here, we aim to (a) improve our understanding of introduction and establishment processes and (b) evaluate whether this information is sufficient to create scientific...

The extent and impacts of biological invasions on biodiversity are largely shaped by an array of socio-ecological predictors, which exhibit high variation among countries. Yet a global synthetic perspective of how these factors vary across countries is currently lacking. Here, we investigate how a set of five socio-ecological predictors (Governance...

Scenario analysis has emerged as a key tool to analyze complex and uncertain future socio-ecological developments. However, current global scenarios (narratives of how the world may develop) have neglected biological invasions, a major threat to biodiversity and the economy. We used a novel participatory process to develop a diverse set of global b...

(a)Aim: Provides an overview of biological invasions and the invasion process, specifically: the introduction, establishment and spread of non-native species. (b)Main concepts covered: The invasion process and its consecutive stages; hypotheses about the invasion success of non-native species. (c)Main methods covered: Standardized categorization of...

The year 2020 and the next few years are critical for the development of the global biodiversity policy agenda until the mid-21 st century, with countries agreeing to a Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework under the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). Reducing the substantial and still rising impacts of invasive alien species (IAS) on biod...

Biological invasions have steadily increased over recent centuries. However, we still lack a clear expectation about future trends in alien species numbers. In particular, we do not know whether alien species will continue to accumulate in regional floras and faunas, or whether the pace of accumulation will decrease due to the depletion of native s...

Biological invasions are a major threat to global biodiversity with particularly strong implications for island biodiversity. Much research has been dedicated towards understanding historic and current changes in alien species distribution and impacts on islands and potential changes under future climate change. However, projections of how alien sp...

Biodiversity data are being collected at unprecedented rates. Such data often have significant value for purposes beyond the initial reason for which they were collected, particularly when they are combined and collated with other data sources. In the field of invasion ecology, however, integrating data represents a major challenge due to the notor...

Understanding the likely future impacts of biological invasions is crucial yet highly challenging given the multiple relevant environmental, socio‐economic and societal contexts and drivers. In the absence of quantitative models, methods based on expert knowledge are the best option for assessing future invasion trajectories. Here, we present an ex...

Biological invasions are a global consequence of an increasingly connected world and the rise in human population size. The numbers of invasive alien species – the subset of alien species that spread widely in areas where they are not native, affecting the environment or human livelihoods – are increasing. Synergies with other global changes are ex...

Despite the Mediterranean being both a hotspot for recreational boating and for non‐indigenous species (NIS), no data currently exists on the recreational boating sector's contribution to the spread of NIS in this Sea. To improve the basis for management decisions, a wide‐scale sampling study on the biofouling communities of recreational vessels an...

For many species, human-induced environmental changes are important indirect drivers of range expansion into new regions. We argue that it is important to distinguish the range dynamics of such species from those that occur without, or with less clear, involvement of human-induced environmental changes. We elucidate the salient features of the rapi...

Biological invasions are a defining feature of the Anthropocene, but the factors that determine the spatially uneven distribution of alien plant species are still poorly understood. Here, we present the first global analysis of the effects of biogeographic factors, the physical environment and socio-economy on the richness of naturalized and invasi...

Biological invasions have emerged as an eminent feature of global change, with substantial impacts on the environment and human livelihoods. Current research demonstrates that the numbers and impacts of alien species are rising unabatedly. At the same time, we lack a thorough understanding of potential future trajectories for the decades to come. W...

With increasing availability of plant distribution data, the information about global plant diversity is improving rapidly. Recently, Ulloa Ulloa et al. (2017) presented the first comprehensive overview of the native vascular flora of the Americas, yielding a total count of 124,993 native species. Of these, 51,241 occur in North America and 82,052...

The number of released individuals, which is a component of propagule pressure, is considered to be a major driver for the establishment success of non-native species. However, propagule pressure is often assumed to result from single or few release events, which does not necessarily apply to the frequent releases of invertebrates or other taxa thr...

AlienScenarios, a three-year project starting in March 2019, will evaluate for the first time the range of plausible futures of biological invasions for the 21 st century. AlienScenarios consists of seven project partners and seven integrated complementary subprojects. We will develop the qualitative narratives for plausible futures of global alien...

China’s ambitious aspirations to build a modern Silk Road will open new avenues for species to spread into regions outside their native range. A new study identifies 14 hot spots of biological invasions falling along the planned economic corridors.

Aim Horticulture has been recognized as the main pathway of plant invasions worldwide. The selection of ornamental garden plants is not random, and certain plant characteristics related to adaptive plant strategies are preferred by horticulture and may promote invasion. We examined the direct and indirect interactions between horticultural use, spe...

This dataset provides the Global Naturalized Alien Flora (GloNAF) database, version 1.2. GloNAF represents a data compendium on the occurrence and identity of naturalized alien vascular plant taxa across geographic regions (e.g. countries, states, provinces, districts, islands) around the globe. The dataset includes 13,939 taxa and covers 1,029 reg...

Significance Islands are hotspots of alien species invasions, and their distinct biodiversity is particularly vulnerable to invading species. While isolation has shaped natural colonization of islands for millions of years, globalization in trade and transport has led to a breakdown of biogeographical barriers and subsequent colonization of islands...

Robust predictions of alien species richness are useful to assess global biodiversity change. Nevertheless, the capacity to predict spatial patterns of alien species richness remains largely unassessed. Using 22 data sets of alien species richness from diverse taxonomic groups and covering various parts of the world, we evaluated whether different...

The number of alien plants escaping from cultivation into native ecosystems is increasing steadily. We provide an overview of the historical, contemporary and potential future roles of ornamental horticulture in plant invasions. We show that currently at least 75% and 93% of the global naturalised alien flora is grown in domestic and botanical gard...

Significance Our ability to predict the identity of future invasive alien species is largely based upon knowledge of prior invasion history. Emerging alien species—those never before encountered as aliens—therefore pose a significant challenge to biosecurity interventions worldwide. Using a global database of the first regional records of alien spe...

Aim Darwin's naturalization hypothesis states that dissimilarity to native species may benefit alien species establishment due to empty niches and reduced competition. We here add a new dimension to large-scale tests of community invasibility, investigating the role that previously established alien species play in facilitating or hindering new in...