Future Aquatic Invaders of the Northeast: How Climate Change, Human Vectors, and Natural History Could Bring Southern and Western Species North

Invasive species are one of the greatest threats to U.S. biodiversity, and aquatic invasions have already cost the global economy $345 billion in mitigation efforts, with the greatest costs incurred in North America. Moreover, climate change is expected to exacerbate this problem by facilitating the spread of invasive species, a circumstance that helps explain why invasive species range shifts resulting from climate change have been identified as a major concern for natural resource managers.

In this webinar, Wesley Daniel (USGS Wetland & Aquatic Research Center) and Catherine Jarnevich (USGS Fort Collins Science Center will discuss their NE CASC project, "Future Aquatic Invaders of the Northeast", which was designed to help address the issues outlined above. For this work, they and their collaborators created realistic future scenarios for the expansion of freshwater aquatic invasive species established in the southern and western U.S. into northeastern waterbodies by utilizing stakeholder inputs on priority invasive aquatic species. Team members used habitat suitability models based on life-history traits projected onto future climate conditions and analyzed known pathways of spread to develop risk scores for the spread and establishment of impactful aquatic invaders in the Northeast. They assessed 93 freshwater aquatic taxa not established in the northeast study area (45 plants, 32 fishes, and 16 invertebrates) but established in neighboring western and southern regions based on stakeholder input and occurrence records. The forecasted habitat suitability maps and pathway risk analysis are informing risk-based assessments of the streams and lakes of the Northeast for each target species. 

Wesley Daniel is a Fishery Biologist at the USGS Wetland and Aquatic Research Center, and leads the USGS Nonindigenous Aquatic Species Database.

Catherine Jarnevich is a Research Ecologist at the USGS Fort Collins Science Center. Her current research involves the application of habitat suitability models to answer applied research and management questions for various species across a range of taxa and spatial scales. Catherine led the development of the Invasive Species Habitat Tool (INHABIT). This tool contains information on the majority of invasive plant species in the contiguous U.S. with sufficient location data for habitat suitability modeling.