In European temperate regions, biological invasions are causing severe ecological and economic impacts. Predicting how climate change will affect future rates and impacts of biological invasions is thus crucial for conserving natural resources and biodiversity. Biological invasions are a major societal issue, with populations of non-native species causing high economic damage across Member States. A European Regulation adopted in 2014 aims to prevent new introductions and stop extant alien species from developing invasions. This requires robust predictions on how introduced alien species will respond to climate change and the management actions designed to prevent invasions. Predictions of ‘invasiveness’ - the ability of an introduced alien species to invade - tend to be based on climate envelope models, but these lack environmental and biological complexity and so produce erroneous predictions. This project has been specifically designed to develop novel models for predicting the consequences of climate change and management actions for the invasiveness of introduced alien species in Europe by integrating climatic, environmental, management and hydrological data. The objectives were thus to select the species to model and collate the data to be modelled, develop and validate an initial agent based model for predicting the invasiveness of an alien fish under current and future climate conditions, parameterise the initial model for each model species, and then predict, under simulations of climate change and management actions, the future invasiveness of the model fishes in some European river basins.
