Trends in research on invasive fishes

Abstract

indirectly to human activity, is a well-recognised phenomenon, which strongly intensified in the 19th Century with the mass migrations of people between continents. This trend continued in the 20th Century when international trade and the transport of people and goods greatly accelerated. Initially the negative effects of deliberate and accidental introductions of alien species were not fully recognised. One of the first insightful works on the subject was the book by the famous British ecologist, Charles Elton, “The Ecology of Invasions by Animals and Plants”, published in 1958. In the 1980s the Scientific Committee on Problems of the Environment (SCOPE) focused on the causes, impacts, and management of invasions, but a breakthrough came after 1992 when, during the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), also known as the Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit, biological invasions were identified as one of five threats to biodiversity (Meyerson & Simberloff 2021). The Convention on Biological Diversity, Article 8, which was formulated at the Rio summit, committed signatory nations to prevent, control, and eradicate potentially harmful alien species. Following this event, the number of publications on biological invasions began to increase exponentially (Ricciardi & MacIsaac 2008, Richardson & Pyšek 2008). Understanding the causes of expansion, especially of an invasive nature, and the consequences for local biota stimulated a generation of researchers to undertake studies aimed at recognizing the principles and general patterns related to this problem (e.g. Lodge 1993, Moyle & Light 1996, Vitousek et al. 1996, Williamson & Griffiths 1996, Richardson & Pyšek 2008), and to develop a common, consistent nomenclature (Copp et al. 2005).