The faunal Ponto-Caspianization of central and western European waterways

Soto, I., Cuthbert, R.N., Ricciardi, A., Ahmed, D.A., Altermatt, F., Schäfer, R.B., Archambaud-Suard, G., Bonada, N., Cañedo-Argüelles, M., Csabai, Z., Datry, T., Dick, J.T.A., Floury, M., Forio, M.A.E., Forcellini, M., Fruget, J.-F., Goethals, P., Haase, P., Hudgins, E.J., Jones, J.I., Kouba, A., Leitner, P., Lizée, M.-H., Maire, A., Murphy, J.F., Ozolins, D., Rasmussen, J.J., Schmidt-Kloiber, A., Skuja, A., Stubbington, R. ORCID: 0000-0001-8475-5109, Van der Lee, G.H., Vannevel, R., Várbíró, G., Verdonschot, R.C.M., Wiberg-Larsen, P., Haubrock, P.J. and Briski, E., 2023. The faunal Ponto-Caspianization of central and western European waterways. Biological Invasions. ISSN 1387-3547

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Abstract

As alien invasive species are a key driver of biodiversity loss, understanding patterns of rapidly changing global species compositions depends upon knowledge of invasive species population dynamics and trends at large scales. Within this context, the Ponto-Caspian region is among the most notable donor regions for aquatic invasive species in Europe. Using macroinvertebrate time series collected over 52 years (1968–2020) at 265 sites across 11 central and western European countries, we examined the occurrences, invasion rates, and abundances of freshwater Ponto-Caspian fauna. We examined whether: (i) successive Ponto-Caspian invasions follow a consistent pattern of composition pioneered by the same species, and (ii) Ponto-Caspian invasion accelerates subsequent invasion rates. In our dataset, Ponto-Caspian macroinvertebrates increased from two species in 1972 to 29 species in 2012. This trend was parallelled by a non-significant increasing trend in the abundances of Ponto-Caspian taxa. Trends in Ponto-Caspian invader richness increased significantly over time. We found a relatively uniform distribution of Ponto-Caspian macroinvertebrates across Europe without any relation to the distance to their native region. The Ponto-Caspian species that arrived first were often bivalves (46.5% of cases), particularly Dreissena polymorpha, followed secondarily by amphipods (83.8%; primarily Chelicorophium curvispinum and Dikerogammarus villosus). The time between consecutive invasions decreased significantly at our coarse regional scale, suggesting that previous alien establishments may facilitate invasions of subsequent taxa. Should alien species continue to translocate from the Ponto-Caspian region, our results suggest a high potential for their future invasion success highly connected central and western European waters. However, each species’ population may decline after an initial 'boom' phase or after the arrival of new invasive species, resulting in different alien species dominating over time.

Item Type: Journal article
Publication Title: Biological Invasions
Creators: Soto, I., Cuthbert, R.N., Ricciardi, A., Ahmed, D.A., Altermatt, F., Schäfer, R.B., Archambaud-Suard, G., Bonada, N., Cañedo-Argüelles, M., Csabai, Z., Datry, T., Dick, J.T.A., Floury, M., Forio, M.A.E., Forcellini, M., Fruget, J.-F., Goethals, P., Haase, P., Hudgins, E.J., Jones, J.I., Kouba, A., Leitner, P., Lizée, M.-H., Maire, A., Murphy, J.F., Ozolins, D., Rasmussen, J.J., Schmidt-Kloiber, A., Skuja, A., Stubbington, R., Van der Lee, G.H., Vannevel, R., Várbíró, G., Verdonschot, R.C.M., Wiberg-Larsen, P., Haubrock, P.J. and Briski, E.
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 19 April 2023
ISSN: 1387-3547
Identifiers:
NumberType
10.1007/s10530-023-03060-0DOI
1754187Other
Rights: © The Author(s) 2023. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Divisions: Schools > School of Science and Technology
Record created by: Linda Sullivan
Date Added: 25 Apr 2023 15:50
Last Modified: 25 Apr 2023 15:50
URI: https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/48830

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