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. 2023 Aug 22;73(8):560-574.
doi: 10.1093/biosci/biad060. eCollection 2023 Aug.

Recent advances in availability and synthesis of the economic costs of biological invasions

Danish A Ahmed  1 , Phillip J Haubrock  1   2   3 , Ross N Cuthbert  4 , Alok Bang  5   6   7 , Ismael Soto  3 , Paride Balzani  3 , Ali Serhan Tarkan  8   9 , Rafael L Macêdo  10   11   12 , Laís Carneiro  13 , Thomas W Bodey  14 , Francisco J Oficialdegui  3 , Pierre Courtois  15 , Melina Kourantidou  16   17 , Elena Angulo  18 , Gustavo Heringer  19   20 , David Renault  21 , Anna J Turbelin  22   23 , Emma J Hudgins  24 , Chunlong Liu  25   26 , Showkat A Gojery  27 , Ugo Arbieu  22   28   29 , Christophe Diagne  30 , Boris Leroy  31 , Elizabeta Briski  32 , Corey J A Bradshaw  33   34 , Franck Courchamp  22
Affiliations

Recent advances in availability and synthesis of the economic costs of biological invasions

Danish A Ahmed et al. Bioscience. .

Abstract

Biological invasions are a global challenge that has received insufficient attention. Recently available cost syntheses have provided policy- and decision makers with reliable and up-to-date information on the economic impacts of biological invasions, aiming to motivate effective management. The resultant InvaCost database is now publicly and freely accessible and enables rapid extraction of monetary cost information. This has facilitated knowledge sharing, developed a more integrated and multidisciplinary network of researchers, and forged multidisciplinary collaborations among diverse organizations and stakeholders. Over 50 scientific publications so far have used the database and have provided detailed assessments of invasion costs across geographic, taxonomic, and spatiotemporal scales. These studies have provided important information that can guide future policy and legislative decisions on the management of biological invasions while simultaneously attracting public and media attention. We provide an overview of the improved availability, reliability, standardization, and defragmentation of monetary costs; discuss how this has enhanced invasion science as a discipline; and outline directions for future development.

Keywords: InvaCost; economic impacts; environmental management; guiding policy; invasive alien species.

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Conflict of interest statement

All authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest.

Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.
The growth of the living InvaCost database including entries from 1960 to 2021, showing temporal trends in (a) recorded database entries; (b) recorded species, including cumulative curves of unique species (the dashed lines, the right y axis; v1.0 is marked in blue, v2.1 in green, v3.0 in brown, and v4.1 in red; the unidentified or diverse species categories have been removed); and (c) the total costs (without any filter but expanded) among versions v1.0, v2.1, v3.0, and v4.1. The high costs associated with v1.0 in the latter years is due to refinement in subsequent versions and not filtering for cost reliability in the costs presented in the present article. The apparent logistic form of the cumulative number of unique species might arise from the reporting lag in cost data, so should not be taken to indicate saturation. R code to generate the data for these plots available at github.com/cjabradshaw/InvaCostVersionTrends. Color images are available in online versions of the article.
Figure 2.
Figure 2.
A total of 52 published research works are based on the InvaCost database, with studies spanning several thematic categories: taxonomic (11 studies), conceptual (7), habitat (3), sectoral (3), general (5), and geographical (23). See supplemental table S1 for references and the database version used in each study.
Figure 3.
Figure 3.
Global maps showing (a) number of established invasive species per country (see supplemental table S5; log10 scale), (b) total costs of invasive species (USformula image billion, 2017 value; log10 scale) per country, (c) number of invasive species reported in InvaCost per country, and (d) average cost (USformula image billion 2017 value) per invasive species reported in InvaCost in each country. The blank countries indicate an absence of data.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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