The development of risk assessment methods for invasive species is needed to prioritize management of invaders towards high risk species and likely locations for establishment. The concern regarding such species has been exacerbated by the climate changes currently underway, which could shift species distributions and change the invaders’ ability to establish. We integrated proxies of propagule pressure, species life history traits, and environmental predictors to generate a pathway-level establishment model, where predictions could vary across space and time as the climate changed. We focused on the freshwater aquarium fish trade in the United States and Canada, in order to predict potential future invasive species in Quebec under the climate change scenarios projected for the year 2050.
Results/Conclusions
As expected, the estimated average probability of establishment predicted by our model showed a slight increase in Quebec under the four Representative Concentration Pathways (RCP) scenarios for climate change in 2050. Interestingly, variability in some environmental variables, more than their mean values, had stronger effects on establishment probabilities, and appears to be the main driver of risk change between 2010 and 2050. As awaited, the species with the highest probability of establishment were those with the highest number of individuals imported. Among these, the three species that pose the highest risk across the administrative regions of Quebec are Puntius tetrazona, commonly known as Tiger barb, Corydoras paleatus, or Blue leopard corydoras, and Poecilia velifera, also named Yucatan molly.