Tuesday, December 21, 2010

The Delayed Legacy of Invasive Species

I am posting this in between my break



I read yesterday a very interesting paper titled “Socioeconomic legacy yields an invasion debt”

Globalization and economic growth are widely recognized as important drivers of biological invasions. Recent studies have demonstrated that on broad spatial scales, the impact of human activities overwhelms the influence of climate and geography on species invasions.   The new research demonstrate that socioeconomic legacies on alien-species richness are important across a broad array of taxonomic groups and might extend back at least one century. The authors say “However, many of the most problematic alien species are not recent arrivals but were introduced several decades ago. Hence, current patterns of alien-species richness may better reflect historical rather than contemporary human activities, a phenomenon which might be called “invasion debt.” Their results suggest that the consequences of the current high levels of socioeconomic activity on the extent of biological invasions will probably not be completely realized until several decades into the future.
Socioeconomic legacy yields an invasion debt

Freely available online through the PNAS open access option

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