Title

Risk assessments for new bioinvasions for the North Sea Region

Authors

Josefin Madjidian, World Maritime UniversityFollow

Files

Description

This deliverable is a compilation of summaries of four scientific papers that cover different aspects of risks connected to marine bioinvasions in the North Sea Region. One of the papers looks deeper into global shipping and adds several factors to shipping density to describe hotspots for potential invasions and invasion routes. Two of the papers dig into concerns of regional perspective (the Wadden Sea), one developing a model of a specific kind of water body’s vulnerability to non-native, the other dealing with questions related to when a species should be stated as a non-native and when it has become part of the native “natural” ecosystem. Finally, one paper is on risk assessment for exemptions of ballast water treatment (also see David, M. and Gollasch, S, 2010, for risk assessment focussing on intra North Sea shipping). All these articles contribute to the understanding of how the risks of bioinvasions must be tackled on a larger geographic scale. Other important risk reduction measures are modelling approaches considering biology and geology of the oceans and monitoring approaches, for example the building of databases on marine invasive species. Here, knowledge about the biology and ecology of the species is important, as well as the abiotic and biotic circumstances of the area of origin, as such information may for example be used to assess whether or not water bodies comply with the ecological demands of the non-natives or to predict scenarios in various kinds of models (e.g. Leewis and Gittenberger, 2011).

Publication Date

2014

Publisher

NSBWO

City

Malmö

Keywords

risk assessment; bioinvasion; invasive species; North Sea

Disciplines

Ecology and Evolutionary Biology | Environmental Health and Protection | International and Area Studies | Transportation