What starts with laughter ends in tears: Invasive alien species regulations should not hinder scientific research

Abstract

Biological invasions represent one of the major threats to the world's biodiversity. National and international efforts are taken to address the complexity and dynamic of invasions in legislation. However, based on the Polish experience of implementing the European Union's regulation on invasive alien species (IAS), we suggest that an unclear and disorganized process of law implementation results in the regulations being counterproductive. We describe how a well-planned policy can become a burden impeding effective research and, consequently, scientific feedback to improve the policy. The results of our study suggest that there is a large scale of scientists' noncompliance with new legal requirements. For many researchers, the implementation of the new IAS regulation was changing the rules in the middle of the game. Researchers strictly following the new regulations must wait for the relevant permits and may risk the successful completion of their projects. Conversely, researchers who prioritize project completion may be forced to continue their research violating the law. We argue that this example of implementing the new IAS regulation illustrates the need to include some intermediate solutions providing more flexibility and time for researchers to adjust to policy change, thus minimizing the negative impacts of the new legislature on scientific progress.