AlienScenarios

Human agency has modified virtually every facet of the biophysical environment with profound implications for the status, distribution and resilience of biodiversity worldwide. Several major drivers of biodiversity loss have been identified with climate change, land-use change and biological invasions being among the most important ones. Changes in climate and land use have received much attention during the last decades, which resulted in readily available scenarios. In contrast, comparable approaches are completely missing for biological invasions despite its importance in driving biodiversity losses, and causing substantial negative impacts on human livelihoods. Worryingly, recent research has shown that numbers of alien species are rising unabatedly in most taxonomic groups. Therefore, a thorough evaluation of plausible future trajectories of biological invasions is urgently needed to enable comprehensive assessments of biodiversity changes for the decades to come, and to allow better-informed decisions of policy makers and stakeholders, and to examine the future implications of different societal responses for biological invasions. In AlienScenarios, we will close this gap by, for the first time, evaluating the range of plausible futures of biological invasions for the 21st century at different spatial scales and for a range of taxonomic groups. Website: https://alien-scenarios.org