Climex - Invasive Species Modelling
10 September, 2005
Climex, from Hearne Scientific Software, was recently used to model and understand the Potential Global Distribution Threat from the Red Imported Fire Ant. The Fire Ant has recently been discovered in Australia and New Zealand.
Risks to natural and managed ecosystems from invasive species and environmental change are creating demand for tools to assess regional risks in a data-poor environment. Specifically, ecologists need to estimate the likelihood of establishment of species in new regions and their impacts on biodiversity, agriculture, and built environments under current and possible future climates. Climex is a software tool in use across the world to help understand the threat from invasive species.
Robert W. Sutherst and Gunter Maywald, CSIRO Entomology, Australia, recently used the CLIMEX model to infer the response of the red imported fire ant, Solenopsis invicta Buren (Hymenoptera: Formicidae), to temperature and moisture from its range in the United States.
The fire ant originates from the Pantanal region in Brazil, Paraguay, and northern Argentina (Buren et al. 1974, Shoemaker et al. 1996, Ross and Shoemaker 2005). It has a broad range of negative impacts on biodiversity (Allen et al. 1994, 2001, Gotelli and Arnett 2000) and urban environments (Lard et al. 2002).
Sutherst and Maywald tested hypotheses on the mechanisms that limit the distribution of the ant and estimated the potential global area at risk from invasion. The ant can spread further in the United States, including north along the west coast, where patterns of infestation will differ from those in the east.
They analysed the risk of colonisation in Australia and New Zealand, where the ant was recently discovered. The patterns of infestation of the ant in Oceania will differ from those in the eastern United States, with slower growth and less winter mortality.
This study adds to earlier temperature-based models by incorporating a
moisture response; by replacing arbitrary categories of colony size to
predict over wintering success with a site-specific model based on the
balance between annual growth and survival; and by comparing different
hypotheses on low temperature-related mechanisms that limit the
geographical distribution. It shows how the response of a species to
climate can be synthesized from field observations to provide useful
insights into its population dynamics. Such
analyses provide a basis for making decisions on regional management of
invasive species and an informative context for local studies.
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