The list “100 of the worst invasive species worldwide”, developed by ISSG has indeed been very successful in communicating the impact of invasive species. Recently, this list was reduced to 99 due to the successful eradication of the Rinderpest Virus from the wild. The opportunity was undertaken to launch a campaign to select the NEW 99+1 of the worst, involving all the invasion biology community in this exercise.
The aim of the campaign is mostly in terms of communication, as it can help us all to show examples of impacts caused by invasive species, and to emphasize the need of increasing the efforts to struggle invasions. But the method that we developed could potentially be used more widely in the future to help identifying key invasive species through a participatory approach. So we are asking your help to select that 100th species through a simplified voting system. The preparatory work has required compiling information about over 10,000 invasive species from many sources, and then to shortlist the number of species on the basis of several criteria, arriving to identify 10 candidates.
What we ask you to do is to go through the website we developed: The 100thof the Worst Invasive Alien Species and vote by leaving a score for the 10 candidate species. All methods, criteria and steps are clearly explained in the website (for any question or doubt, please contact me at franck.courchamp@u-psud.fr<mailto:franck.courchamp@u-psud.fr>). There is no need to know all the species to vote, you can either rank them all, or vote for one or for a few only (and put ex-aequo for the rest).
All scores will be tallied until the 31st of January. Once the vote is closed, we will notify you by email about the species that the community has chosen to add to the ISSG list.
All the system has been designed to ensure that the voting will not take much of your time, so PLEASE VOTE!!. The results will indeed help us raise the profile of the issue of invasive species.
Also, please, please, do forward it to all your colleagues working on alien invasive species, be they academic or not.