I'm a bit confused why you edited out the (admittedly vague) method for naming something "invasive":
On 4/10/26 7:42 AM, glen wrote:
• Local abundance: high relative cover, biomass, or density compared with other species in plots or communities • Spread rate: rate at which populations expand from the introduction point (e.g., distance or area increase per year) • Geographic range size: total invaded area or number of occupied sites/regions • Environmental (niche) range: diversity of environments (climates, habitats) where the species maintains populations • Alien species richness = alien species / total species. • Alien abundance = alien individuals or cover / total community.
This isn't that post-hoc. If an agency in, say, Vermont decides a species is invasive *there*, then agencies in WA will call it "invasive" even if we've never seen it out here, and even if it wouldn't actually *be* very invasive if it were out here. It's also not *that* anthrocentric. Sure, we're human so we think in human-like ways. But these measures and derivations *might* be amenable to being objectified ... to locale-specific or locale-biased. So an introduced species might not matter to us as much as it matters to some other species in that region. We would do this work on behalf of those "native" species (or that local ecology), not so much because it matters to us except where we value diversity and global biosphere health. Could those 6 measures be made entirely objective? No. Biology is relational. But I think it's a disservice to accuse them of being purely about humans. On 4/10/26 5:45 PM, Steve Smith wrote:
I'm (well) over my head and (well) outside whatever wheelhouse I might occupy but I am compelled: I think part of why this keeps circling is that we’re staying at the level of language—what counts as an “it,” whether something qualifies as an “invasive species.” Not unimportant, but downstream of the actual dynamics? What shows up first, at least in the field examples glen mentioned, isn’t a species, it’s a change: * crops failing * pollination dropping * something spreading A shift in the landscape—some affordance opening up, some constraint disappearing. “invasive species” reads less like a fundamental category and more like a label we apply post-hoc. Based on an identified a carrier that matters to us. Anthrorelativism creeps in—we tend to call something “invasive” when the change is fast /and/ intersects with human interests? I’m more interested in the mismatch in timescales: * ecosystems can reconfigure niches relatively quickly (disturbance, climate, land use, etc.) * species/genetic adaptation is significantly slower you get situations where the niche landscape shifts faster than the resident community can track, and then whatever competency bundle happens to fit—whether already present or newly arrived—expands rapidly. At that point, asking “what is the invasive species?” feels a bit like asking for the name of the thing after the phase transition has already started. Sometimes there is a clear “it,” sometimes there isn’t, or it’s a constellation. So I’m less concerned with pinning down the ontology up front, and more with: * what changed in the affordance structure * how quickly it changed * and which populations were able to respond on that timescale The “invasive” label then becomes a kind of shorthand for that high-rate, human-salient reconfiguration, rather than the starting point of the explanation. It also is deeply loaded with judgement, reflecting the "convenience" to the observer?
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