Research

Three connected strands, all aimed at making the impacts of invasive species comparable.

1Naming the impact

A typology of ecological impacts

Existing frameworks either miss whole categories of impact or confuse the mechanism — predation, competition, disease — with the consequence. I worked on a typology that separates the two and covers the full range of ecological effects, so that two studies of two different species can be placed on the same map.

2Scoring the severity

From categories to a comparable scale

Once impacts are named, they still have to be ranked. Not every impact type matters equally, and severity runs from a change you can barely detect to the loss of a species from a site. I combine expert judgement with published evidence to put both of those on defined scales.

minimal concernmassive

3Where it lands

Invasions in protected areas

Protected areas are the backbone of conservation policy, and they are not closed to invasion. In a global synthesis of 300 reported effects from 44 invasive species, impacts were negative across population, community and ecosystem scales, on every continent with enough data to test. Which raises the obvious follow-up: does protection make any measurable difference?

How I work

Mostly evidence synthesis: systematic reviews, meta-analysis, expert elicitation and a lot of R. Analyses are versioned on GitHub and the tools are built to be reusable by other people, not just to produce one figure for one paper.