Expert perceptions of the relative importance of ecological impacts of biological invasions
A survey of more than 400 invasion scientists, used to weight impact types against each other instead of treating them as equivalent.
Laís Carneiro
Postdoctoral researcher in invasion ecology. ESE lab, Université Paris-Saclay — Franck Courchamp's group.
What I work on
How much damage does an invasive species actually do? The question sounds simple and isn't. Impacts are reported across thousands of separate studies, in units that don't line up, for a small set of well-studied species — which makes them very hard to compare, and harder still to act on.
My research turns that scattered evidence into something standardised. I build typologies and severity scales for ecological impact, run global syntheses and meta-analyses, and design metrics that let impacts be ranked across species, habitats and continents. I trained as an environmental engineer before moving into ecology, and I still work that way: measurement first, then inference.
Recent papers
Expanding invasive species impact assessments to the ecosystem level with EEICAT
Extends the EICAT impact classification beyond species-level effects so that ecosystem-level consequences can be scored consistently.
Quantifying the magnitude of biological invasions using total biomass
Proposes total non-native biomass as a single, comparable measure of how large an invasion actually is.