Davis Declaration

Capacity of United States federal government and its partners to rapidly and accurately report the identity (taxonomy) of non-native organisms intercepted in early detection programs

“…Because the United States cannot provide all of the expertise and resources it needs to manage identification of intercepts from other countries, it must have an interest in global capacity. In 2001 the Davis Declaration emphasized the need for international collaboration and strategy to coordinate invasive species taxonomic and information services (Davis Declaration 2001). International networks of taxonomists have been set up, the most extensive being BIONet-International (Jones 1995), although this has been inactive for the past 5 years.…”

“…The importance of taxonomic support for invasive species identification has been emphasized globally (Davis Declaration 2001;Smith et al 2008;Pyšek et al 2013; Commission on Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture 2019) and nationally (Meyerson and Reaser 2003;Chitwood et al 2008;Diaz-Soltero and Rossman 2011;Buffington et al 2018a, b). A general concern, also raised by federal agencies and individuals contacted in this study, is the diminishing availability of taxonomic expertise, arising from a decreasing number of scientists and changing priorities of laboratories (Meyerson and Reaser 2003;Stack et al 2006).…”