Montserrat Vilà

Spanish National Research Council | CSIC · Doñana Biological Station

In a hyperconnected world, framing and managing biological invasions poses complex and contentious challenges, affecting socioeconomic and environmental sectors. This complexity distinguishes the field and fuels polarized debates. In the present article, we synthesize four contentious issues in invasion science that are rarely addressed together: v...

Plant invasions are a major threat worldwide, posing significant ecological and economic threats. In federally managed countries—where policy implementation is divided among various jurisdictions under a central federal government—alien plant species pose an even more difficult challenge for management at the national scale due to the fragmented na...

Despite decades of research documenting the consequences of naturalized and invasive plant species on ecosystem functions, our understanding of the functional underpinnings of these changes remains rudimentary. This is partially due to ineffective scaling of trait differences between native and naturalized species to whole plant communities.Working...

There is broad concern that the range shifts of global flora and fauna will not keep up with climate change, increasing the likelihood of population declines and extinctions. Many populations of nonnative species already have advantages over native species, including widespread human-aided dispersal and release from natural enemies. But do nonnativ...

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)...

The negative interaction between multiple invasive species, when an invasive predator benefits from a previously introduced and abundant prey, poses unanticipated challenges for the joint management of invaders. To illustrate this question, we describe the surge and collapse of the invasive apple snail Pomacea maculata population before and after t...

Invasive species significantly impact biodiversity and ecosystem services, yet understanding these effects at large spatial scales remains a challenge. Our study addresses this gap by assessing the current and potential future risks posed by 94 invasive species to seven key ecosystem services in Europe. We demonstrate widespread potential impacts,...

Terminology for the invasion status of alien species has typically relied either on ecological- or policy-based criteria, with the former emphasising species’ ability to overcome ecological barriers and the latter on species’ impacts. There remains no universal consensus about definitions of invasion. Without an agreement on definitions, it is diff...

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...

The impacts of invasive species can vary widely across invaded sites and depend on the ecological variable of study. In this paper, we describe the first harmonised database that compiles scientific evidence of the ecological impacts of invasive plant species at continental scale. We summarise results from 266 publications reporting 4259 field stud...

Pollinators benefit from increasing floral resources in agricultural landscapes, which could be an underexplored co‐benefit of mass‐flowering crop cultivation. However, the impacts of mass‐flowering crops on pollinator communities are complex and appear to be context‐dependent, mediated by factors such as crop flowering time and the availability of...

The Environmental Impact Classification for Alien Taxa (EICAT) is an important tool for biological invasion policy and management and has been adopted as an International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) standard to measure the severity of environmental impacts caused by organisms living outside their native ranges. EICAT has already been in...

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...

Biological invasions are a major threat to Australia. Information on alien flora in Australia is collated independently by different jurisdictions, which has led to inconsistencies at the national level, hampering efficient management. To harmonise different information sources, we present the Alien Flora of Australia (AFA), a nationally unified da...

Over the last decades, terminology to refer to invasion status along the introduction-naturalisation-invasion continuum have been based either on overcome barriers or on impact-based frameworks, generating debates within the scientific community. The lack of agreement with regards to definitions have sometimes hampered combining information from so...

Aim Native biodiversity is threatened by the spread of non‐native invasive species. Many studies demonstrate that invasions reduce local biodiversity but we lack an understanding of how impacts vary across environments at the macroscale. Using ~11,500 vegetation surveys from ecosystems across the United States, we quantified how the relationship be...

Invasive alien species have widespread impacts on native biodiversity and ecosystem services. Since the number of introductions worldwide is continuously rising, it is essential to prevent the entry, establishment and spread of new alien species through a systematic examination of future potential threats. Applying a three-step horizon scanning con...

Determining the factors that pre-adapt plant species to successfully establish and spread outside of their native ranges constitutes a powerful approach with great potential for management. While this source-area approach accounts for the bias associated with species' regions of origin, it has been only implemented in pools of species known to be e...

Agricultural expansion and intensification have boosted global food production but have come at the cost of environmental degradation and biodiversity loss. Biodiversity-friendly farming that boosts ecosystem services, such as pollination and natural pest control, is widely being advocated to maintain and improve agricultural productivity while saf...

Upon arrival to a new area, alien species have to overcome a series of biotic and abiotic barriers to survive, reproduce, and spread and thus, succeed along the invasion continuum. Failing to understand the role of the different sets of barriers and factors operating across the stages of the invasion continuum limit our ability to predict invasion...

Invasive species science has focused heavily on the invasive agent. However, management to protect native species also requires a proactive approach focused on resident communities and the features affecting their vulnerability to invasion impacts. Vulnerability is likely the result of factors acting across spatial scales, from local to regional, a...

Invasive Alien Species are a major driver of biodiversity loss, but their threats to nature’s contributions to people (NCP) at large spatial scales remain largely undetermined. Here we quantify and map the current and potential threat posed by invasive species of concern in Europe to regulating, material and nonmaterial NCP. We show that the curren...

One of the most invoked mechanisms mediating the positive effect of pollinator diversity on plant reproduction is pollinator's niche complementarity (i.e. partitioning of resource use by different pollinator species). However, the influence of spatial and temporal pollinator's niche complementarity on crop pollination function is rarely tested. We...

A major aim in invasion ecology is to understand the role of exotic species in plant communities. Whereas most studies have explored the traits of exotic species in the context of the introduced community, functional comparisons of entire assemblages of species in their native and introduced communities have rarely been analysed. Taking advantage o...

Bees are a diverse group with more than 1000 species known from the Iberian Peninsula. They have increasingly received special attention due to their important role as pollinators and providers of ecosystem services. In addition, various rapid human-induced environmental changes are leading to the decline of some of its populations. However, we kno...

Impact assessments can help prioritising limited resources for invasive species management. However, their usefulness to provide information for decision-making depends on their repeatability, i.e. the consistency of the estimated impact. Previous studies have provided important insights into the consistency of final scores and rankings. However, d...

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...

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...

Urban parks and gardens are one of the most important pathways for the deliberate introduction of non-native plant species, some of which cause environmental and socioeconomic impacts. We conducted a risk assessment on 388 non-native woody plant species from 46 urban parks of mainland Spain to classify them in lists based on their invasion status,...

Species introduced through human-related activities beyond their native range, termed alien species, have various impacts worldwide. The IUCN Environmental Impact Classification for Alien Taxa (EICAT) is a global standard to assess negative impacts of alien species on native biodiversity. Alien species can also positively affect biodiversity (for i...

Invasive alien species (IAS) are one of the main threats to biodiversity conservation, with significant socio-economic and ecological impacts as they disrupt ecosystem services and compromise human well-being. Global change may exacerbate the impacts of IAS, since rising temperatures and human activities favour their introduction and range expansio...

Significance International concern about the consequences of human-induced global environmental changes has prompted a renewed focus on reducing ecological effects of biological invasions, climate change, and nutrient pollution. Our results show that the combined effects of nonnative species invasions and abiotic global environmental changes are of...

The invasive apple snail (Pomacea maculata) appeared in 2010 in the Ebro Delta Natural Park, an important area for rice production and waterbird conservation in the eastern Mediterranean. To control crop damage, farmers stopped flooding their rice fields in winter, an agri-environmental scheme (AES) applied for more than 20 years in some European a...

Over two million commercial bumblebee colonies are used on an annual basis to pollinate around 20 crop types worldwide. Despite their use, especially with crops grown in greenhouses, there is mounting evidence that many individuals also forage outside of them. Hence, the use of commercial bumblebees poses a risk to wild pollinators, especially to t...

Urban parks and gardens provide cultural and aesthetic services critical for human well-being. Yet, they represent one of the main reasons for the intentional introduction of ornamental species, some of which can escape and establish in natural ecosystems. Besides aesthetic reasons, climate and socioeconomic factors can also modulate which species...

Invasion biology examines species originated elsewhere and moved with the help of humans, and those species’ impacts on biodiversity, ecosystem services, and human well-being. In a globalized world, the emergence and spread of many human infectious pathogens are quintessential biological invasion events. Some macroscopic invasive species themselves...

The introduction stage is usually overlooked in trait-based studies of invasiveness, implicitly assuming that species introductions are random. However, human activities promote the movement of specific types of species. Thus, species deliberately introduced for distinct purposes (e.g. gardening, forestry) or as contaminants of human commodities (e...

Crops worldwide are simultaneously affected by weeds, which reduce yield, and by climate change, which can negatively or positively affect both crop and weed species. While the individual effects of environmental change and of weeds on crop yield have been assessed, the combined effects have not been broadly characterized. To explore the simultaneo...

Functional segregation among species in a community depends on their mean trait values (i.e. functional distinctiveness), and the range of trait attributes exhibited by each species (i.e. functional diversity). Previous evidence suggests that invasive plants tend to display traits related to a more acquisitive resource-use strategy than natives. Ho...

La cosecha de más de dos tercios de las principales especies de cultivos a nivel mundial depende de polinizadores. Para asegurar la producción y calidad óptima de frutos y semillas, muchos agricultores utilizan polinizadores comerciales en sus cultivos, como la abeja de la miel o los abejorros. Sin embargo, el uso de estos polinizadores no está opt...

Unprecedented rates of introduction and spread of non-native species pose burgeoning challenges to biodiversity, natural resource management, regional economies, and human health. Current biosecurity efforts are failing to keep pace with globalization, revealing critical gaps in our understanding and response to invasions. Here, we identify four pr...

The number of alien species arriving within new regions has increased at unprecedented rates. Managing the pathways through which alien species arrive and spread is important to reduce the threat of biological invasions. Harmonising information on pathways across individual sectors and user groups is therefore critical to underpin policy and action...

In agricultural landscapes, differences in floral resources provided by crops compared with adjacent habitats promote the spillover of pollinators seeking to fulfil their feeding needs. These foraging patterns play an important role in both crop production and wild plant fitness. However, in classical observational studies, pollinator spillover pat...

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...

The introduction of exotic species to new regions offers opportunities to test fundamental questions in ecology, such as the context-dependency of community structure and assembly. Annual grasslands provide a model system of a major unidirectional introduction of plant species from Europe to North America. We compared the community structure of gra...

As Earth’s climate rapidly changes, species range shifts are considered key to species persistence. However, some range-shifting species will alter community structure and ecosystem processes. By adapting existing invasion risk assessment frameworks, we can identify characteristics shared with high-impact introductions and thus predict potential im...

Land-use intensification (LUI) and biological invasions are two of the most important global change pressures driving biodiversity loss. However, their combined impacts on biological communities have been seldom explored, which may result in misleading ecological assessments or mitigation actions. Based on an extensive field survey of 445 paired in...

Agricultural intensification and associated loss of high‐quality habitats are key drivers of insect pollinator declines. With the aim of decreasing the environmental impact of agriculture, the 2014 EU Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) defined a set of habitat and landscape features (Ecological Focus Areas: EFAs) farmers could select from as a requir...

Background and aims: Since its emergence in the mid-20th century, invasion biol- ogy has matured into a productive research field addressing questions of fundamen- tal and applied importance. Not only has the number of empirical studies increased through time, but also has the number of competing, overlapping and, in some cases, contradictory hypot...

Distributed environmental research infrastructures are important to support assessments of the effects of global change on landscapes, ecosystems and society. These infrastructures need to provide continuity to address long-term change, yet be flexible enough to respond to rapid societal and technological developments that modify research prioritie...

Horticulture is one of the main pathways of deliberate introduction of non-native plants, some of which might become invasive. Of the 914 commercial ornamental outdoor plant species sold in Spain, 700 (77%) are non-native (archaeophytes excluded) marketed species. We classified these into six different lists based on their invasion status in Spain...

Invasive Alien Species (IAS) are amongst the most significant drivers of species extinction and ecosystem degradation, causing negative impacts on ecosystem services and human well-being. InvasiBES, a project funded by BiodivERsA-Belmont Forum for 2019–2021, will use data and models across scales, habitats and species to understand and anticipate t...

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...

To predict the threat of biological invasions to native species, it is critical that we understand how increasing abundance of invasive alien species (IAS) affects native populations and communities. The form of this relationship across taxa and ecosystems is unknown, but is expected to depend strongly on the trophic position of the IAS relative to...

The use of commercial bumblebees to aid crop pollination may result in overcrowding of agricultural landscapes by pollinators. Consequently, transmission of parasites between pollinators via shared flowers may be substantial. In SW Spain, we assessed the initial infection status of commercial Bombus terrestris colonies, and then explored spatial an...

Standardized tools are needed to identify and prioritize the most harmful non-native species (NNS). A plethora of assessment protocols have been developed to evaluate the current and potential impacts of non-native species, but consistency among them has received limited attention. To estimate the consistency across impact assessment protocols, 89...

Question Do invasions by alien plant species with contrasting trait profiles (Arctotheca calendula, Carpobrotus spp., Conyza bonariensis and Opuntia dillenii) change the functional and phylogenetic structure of coastal plant communities?. Location Atlantic coastal habitats in Huelva (Spain). Methods We identified species diversity and composition...

Impact assessment protocols (i.e. scoring systems) for non-native species have been developed and implemented relatively recently, driven by an increasing demand for desk study approaches to screen and classify non-native species, considering their environmental and socio-economic impacts. While a number of impact assessment protocols have been dev...

In recent decades, there has been a remarkable expansion of pollinator-dependent crops. An increase in the use of commercial pollinator colonies associated with these crops may promote the spillover of managed pollinators into nearby natural habitats. There, these managed pollinators can exploit floral resources similar to those of wild pollinators...

The European Union (EU) has recently published its first list of invasive alien species (IAS) of EU concern to which current legislation must apply. The list comprises species known to pose great threats to biodiversity and needs to be maintained and updated. Horizon scanning is seen as critical to identify the most threatening potential IAS that d...