This is a short description of the project. Remember that this being a top secret project, you cannot share it freely (see the Non Disclosure Agreement that you are supposed to sign to register officially), or we would need to make you disappear… 😉
The project aims at unifying the various types of impacts into a single metric to allow impact quantifications and therefore permit compilations and comparisons across regions, taxonomic groups, ecosystems, time and various drivers. Our project is divided into 5 distinct steps, each ambitious and risky, but each necessary to achieve our goal. These are :
- Develop a framework for assessing quantitatively the ecological impact of invasive species across different ecosystems and regions, using a specifically designed typology of costs and their weighted importance. This has now been achieved, during InvaPact I, and is published (here).
- Design a unified, quantitative metrics of all types of impacts so that they can be compared and compiled. This has also been achieved, during InvaPact I and II (and in between), and will soon be published.
- Create an AI-based protocol to collect impact data from the literature, test it (with human subjects…) and validate it. We are currently working full speed on that.
- Construct a specifically designed database of impacts of biological invasions worldwide and fill it up with the data collected by the AI process. This will be started very soon, based on thousands of studies on impacts, which each will be translated into one or several quantified impacts using the metrics. It will be ready before the start of the workshop.
- Conduct hypothesis-based, descriptive, conceptual and inferential studies on the quantified impact of invasions according to different questions and angles. This will be the object of the two November workshops, InvaPact III in Spain and InvaPact IV in China.
