Science Facing Aliens - Invasive Alien Species in Belgium - Belgian ...

Research on biological invasions: a Belgian perspective
Etienne BRANQUART, Barbara GONZALEZ, Dimitri BROSENS & Hendrik SEGERS
Belgian Biodiversity Platform, Brussels
Introduction
Three years after the SOS invasion milestone meeting, the Science facing Aliens conference
was a new opportunity to produce an overview on Belgian research dedicated to biological
invasions. In preparation to the conference, we inventoried the Belgian research linked to the
conference theme and assessed its performance relative to European research, the results of
which we present here.
Methodology
Inventory of the Belgian research
Research projects dealing with biological invasions were surveyed through the BioBel
database (Belgian Biodiversity Platform, http://biobel.biodiversity.be, accessed April 30,
2009). Projects extracted from the database were sorted in two different categories. The first
includes projects that focus on biological invasions and involve at least 1 full- time scientist.
The second includes projects that deal with invasion ecology incidentally.
Several attributes were assigned to the projects. This includes starting and ending date
of the project, taxonomic affiliation, habitat type, research topic, and funding source. Five
main research topics were considered based on the session themes of the last Neobiota
conference (Prague, September 2008) : invasion and dispersion patterns, mechanisms and
evolution of invasions, impacts of invasions, prediction and risk assessment and management
practices. These topics are supposed to encompass the full spectrum of research activities
linked to biological invasions.
For all the analyses presented below, individual projects were weighted based on the
number of research teams involved with a least 1 full-time scientist. This implies that more
weight was attributed to large networks than to individual PhD theses.
Although we made a great effort to include all invasion-related research projects in BioBel,
some may have escaped our attention. The following results need to be interpreted with this
caveat in mind.
Performance of Belgian research compared to European research
Bibliometric analyses were performed to compare Belgian with European research dedicated
to invasion ecology. We used the terms “biological invasion*” or “invasive species” or “alien
species” or “non-indigenous species” or “non-native species” or “exotic species” or
“invader*” to search papers published between 1990 and 2008 included in Web of Science ®
(WoS) . Then, we extracted those papers to which at least one European author contributed.
This yielded 2796 papers, among which 88 were produced by Belgian authors, alone or in
collaboration with international authors.
Two different performance indicators were calculated using this information. Our first
indicator intends to reflect the research attention dedicated to invasion-related issues in a
85