Global risk of invasion by terrestrial vertebrates under contrasting SSP scenarios

2018

The introduction of alien species is among the main causes of biodiversity decline in the Anthropocene. We generated predictions of how climate and land-use change may modulate invasions by exotic species in the coming decades. We used the InSiGHTS modelling framework, which projects global species distributions through bioclimatic envelopes and habitat suitability models (HSMs), to predict the introduction and invasion risk of 333 allochthonous mammals and amphibians in three scenarios of global change: Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) 2.6 - Shared Socioeconomic Pathway (SSP) 1; RCP 6.0 – SSP 3; and RCP 8.5 – SSP 5. The bioclimatic envelopes were developed using biomod2 with spec…