Our current research project aims at standardising all ecological impacts of biological invasions into a single, simple metric, so that they can then be compiled accros IAS, invaded regions, ecosystems and habitats, in order to allow quantifications, compilations, comparisons and analyses of trends and correlates to various drivers.
This is how it all started. In 2014, I launched a similar project to collect, standardise, compile and analyse the economic costs of biological invasions worldwide: InvaCost.
That project aimed at quantifying that one type of impact, but also raising awareness by demonstrating that invasions are a real, concrete issue, and that is unfortunately more easily done with figures in dollars than in number of threatened species when outside academia.
In 2019, we had our standardisation procedure and our first InvaCost database, which allowed me to organise an international and interdisciplinary workshop, with colleagues from 27 countries, to analyse together this database and produce studies on its content. With a group of amazing colleagues, we then continued to refine and feed the InvaCost database, and I organised a second workshop (InvaCost II, in 2022) with similar objectives. As of now, we have gathered over 130 from 45 countries and InvaCost has yield 87 studies (with a few more in process). We continue to refine the database, as there are always errors, biaises and gaps to correct.
But the real objective – long term – was to focus on ecological impacts, which was rendered much harder by the diversity of their types, which seemingly precluded any standardisation and thus global analyses. We had in mind this switch since the first InvaCost workshop in 2019, but didn’t know how to make it happen. In 2023, I decided to gamble and organised a third workshop, InvaPact, this time with the objective of designing a unifying metric that would allow quantitative comparison of any type of ecological impact, something we all agreed was impossible. You can see how this was achieved with a number of great colleagues, on this short clip here. We did succeed, and over the next year, I worked with my team and a few collaborators to improve this metric until it seemed excellent. I then organised (in 2024) a 4th workshop, InvaPact II, with the primary goal to refine a process of automatic extraction of impact data from the literature, because the sheer amount to available studies on this theme forbade us from doing it manually as we had done before. During this InvaPact II workshop, we also analysed a ‘proto-database’ (based on extractions from 5,000 published studies) and thought about possible studies. Since that last workshop, our group spent all our time working on this automated extraction (and in particular on its precision) to obtain the largest, most accurate and most complete database of ecological impacts of biological invasions worldwide, spanning across taxa, habitats, regions, mechanisms, etc. We are not ready yet, but we will be soon.
Now is thus the time to organise InvaPact III, a workshop specifically designed to analyse collectively the database. This third InvaPact workshop is described here. We look forward to welcoming you there!