Ancient Biological Invasions and Island Ecosystems: Tracking Translocations of Wild Plants and Animals

Anthropogenic introduction of species is homogenizing the earth's biota. Consequences of introductions are sometimes great, and are directly related to global climate change, biodiversity AND release of genetically engineered organisms. Progress in invasion studies hinges on the following research trends: realization that species' ranges are naturally dynamic; recognition that colonist species and target communities cannot be studied independently, but that species-community interactions determine invasion success; increasingly quantitative tests of how species and habitat characteristics relate to invasibility and impact; recognition from paleobiological, experimental and modeling studies that history, chance and determinism together shape community invasibility. Copyright © 1993. Published by Elsevier Ltd.

There has been a dramatic growth in research on biological invasions over the past 20 years, but a mature understanding of the field has been hampered because invasion biologists concerned with different taxa and different environments have largely adopted different model frameworks for the invasion process, resulting in a confusing range of concepts, terms and definitions. In this review, we propose a unified framework for biological invasions that reconciles and integrates the key features of the most commonly used invasion frameworks into a single conceptual model that can be applied to all human-mediated invasions. The unified framework combines previous stage-based and barrier models, and provides a terminology and categorisation for populations at different points in the invasion process. Copyright © 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.