Biological invasions are occurring more frequently and with greater impact to ecosystem services. To address the issue of invasive species the Australian Weed Risk Assessment (AWRA) was created as a regulatory tool to assess the potential ‘weediness’ of plant species under consideration for importation, with invasion risk determined based on plant traits related to biogeography, undesirable attributes, and biology or ecology. This basic pest risk assessment model has since been expanded and adapted for use on other taxa, often without adequate validation. Therefore, it is unknown whether such an expanded assessment tool is applicable or accurate for evaluating invasive risk in other taxa. As a case study, we performed a review of peer-reviewed literature for traits related to invasiveness in insects. We then compared the identified invasive traits of insects with those identified for plants in the AWRA.
Results/Conclusions
We illustrate that although there is some overlap in invasive traits, there are many unique traits related to invasion for both insects and plants, especially related to insect behaviour. We identified 12 of the 30 traits that were related to insect invasion do not have a clear analogue to plant traits, and therefore are unique to insects. This result suggests that a pest risk assessment developed for plant invasion may not be applicable for insects because traits that are important to insect invasion may be missing from the assessment. This may also be the case for other taxa. To increase predictive power, taxon-specific risk assessment tools and deliberate verifications may be required.