Valuing the contributions of non-native species to people and nature

| June 4, 2024 | Leave a Comment

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Date of Publication: December

Year of Publication: 2022

Publication City: Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Publisher: Science Direct

Author(s): Dov F. Sax, Martin A. Schlaepfer, Julian D. Olden

Journal: Trends in Ecology & Evolution

Volume: 37, Issue 12

Pages: 1058-1066

Highlights

  • The study of non-native species has predominantly focused on quantifying the costs they inflict on people and nature.
  • Recent decades have witnessed scientists acknowledging, and over the past few years increasingly investigating, the benefits that non-native species may provide.
  • Here we provide a framework for considering the diversity of positive benefits supported by non-native species relative to relational, instrumental, and intrinsic values.
  • Despite undoubted publication biases, we find that benefits of non-native species are diverse, frequent, and often of large magnitude.
  • More research aimed at considering benefits of non-native species, and contrasting these benefits with costs is needed to advance our understanding of the impacts of non-native species and better contextualize management and policy decisions.

Access the full paper here.

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