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

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raised awareness on the importance of the phenomenon at a world-wide scale (Richardson &
Pysek 2008).
In Europe, the number of publications dealing explicitly with invasion ecology is
increasing exponentially since the early nineties (Figure 4). The top 10 international journals
publishing papers on biological invasions is as follows (number of papers published between
brackets): Biological Invasions (107), Diversity and distribution (90), Hydrobiologia (72),
Journal of Applied Ecology (63), Molecular Ecology (59), Biological Conservation (58),
Biodiversity and Conservation (41), Marine Ecology (38), Oecologia (38) and Journal of
Biogeography (34).
Number of publications
1000
100
10
1
1990
Europe
Belgium
1992
1994
1996
1998
2000
Years
2002
2004
2006
2008
Figure 4 - Growth in the
number of publications
registered on Web of
Science, by European
and Belgian scientists.
Publications by Belgian scientists on biological invasions started to appear with a time lag of
6 to 9 years compared to the overall production in Europe (figure 4). With a total of 88
international publications, Belgium rates 7 th amongst European countries, after correcting the
number of publication for population size of the country (figure 5A). The impact of
publications by Belgian scientists, as measured by the average number of times they are cited,
appears to be relatively low when compared to those by their European colleagues (figure
5B).
On top of international publications, Belgian scientists produce significant amounts of
valuable “grey” literature. Notwithstanding the sometimes unjustified poor perception of
such publications, they are particularly useful for risk assessment and management purposes.
An example is the “Catalogue of the Neophytes in Belgium” (1800-2005) (Verloove 2006) or
the various reports produced by scientists of the Research Institute for Nature and Forest.
Most of these publications are referred to in the Harmonia information system of the Belgian
Forum on Invasive Species and in the data centre of the Flanders Marine Institute.
Twenty percent of Belgian papers published in WoS-indexed journals result from
BelSPO funded projects. This concerns mainly research teams that are member of the
INPLANBEL-PERINBEL-ALIEN IMPACT suite of projects. The following laboratories also
contributed significantly to the production of Belgian publications related to invasion
ecology: Animal Ecology (UA), Behavioural and Evolutionary Ecology (ULB), Biological
Control and Spatial Ecology (ULB), Forestry (UGent) and Forest, Nature and Landscape
(KUL).
Despite the high level of the scientific research dedicated to invasion ecology in
Belgium, only few research teams have been able to exploit European funding sources. The
only institutions involved in European Research and Technology Development (RTD)