Moving from Latent to Manifest Problem: Trajectories Across Scientific and Public Salience of Invasive Alien Species

Abstract

Who worries first about an invasive alien species: scientists or the general public, or do both become concerned simultaneously? Taking thirteen invasive alien species in the Netherlands, this article reconstructs the development of their public and scientific salience: the attention they attracted and the knowledge about them. Salience was assessed from the number of publications from 1997 onwards in the LexisNexis newspaper database and Scopus scientific database. Three trajectories were derived for a species to move from being a latent problem with low salience toward a manifest status with high public and scientific salience. In the most common trajectory, scientific salience increased first, followed by an increase in public salience. We probed the merit of this concept of trajectories by examining the action undertaken for a representative species of the trajectories. We assigned each of these three species a code for inertia and inaction based on the content of a hundred newspaper articles and all available government documents. Knowing the scientific and public salience of these species clarifies why the actions to deal with them differed even though from an ecological perspective they warranted similar attention. The typology of public and scientific salience and the problem trajectories developed in this article together offer a structured approach for understanding an invasive alien species and provide pointers for engaging a community in managing that species.

Greening conceals evergreening: contrasting trends for a socio-ecological system in Arctic Europe

“…52 , an ever stronger process in the management blind spot of the reindeer herding SES with potentially adverse long-term consequences for the diversity and productivity of this critical indigenous Arctic pastoral system. Furthermore, our results suggest crowberry encroachment delimits areas available for pastures 41,53 , adding to ongoing loss of land with productive pastures due to human disturbance 32 and other stressors 10,54 .…”

“…Overall, our results on crowberry encroachment suggest an ongoing decline in the quality of pasture land (Skarin et al 2020;Iversen et al 2014), adding to ongoing loss of land with productive pastures due to human disturbance (Hausner et al 2020) and other stressors (Vaas et al 2021;Horstkotte et al 2017). Loss of pasture quality may additionally amplify other stressors, further eroding the resilience of an increasingly vulnerable Arctic system.…”

“…the diversity and productivity of this critical indigenous Arctic pastoral system. Furthermore, our results suggest crowberry encroachment delimits areas available for pastures (Skarin et al 2020;Iversen et al 2014), adding to ongoing loss of land with productive pastures due to human disturbance (Hausner et al 2020) and other stressors (Vaas et al 2021;Horstkotte et al 2017). Such loss may even amplify other stressors, further eroding resilience of the system.…”

“…Presently, however, crowberry encroachment, and its ecological and socio-economic impacts, remain largely unobserved and subject to high epistemic uncertainty (cf. Shackleton, Shackleton, and Kull 2019; van der Wal et al 2015) that can impede development of management norms and objectives (Vaas et al 2021; Davis et al 2019). Validation and monitoring of Arctic vegetation change has relied heavily on remote sensing indices (Myers-Smith et al 2020; Henden et al 2020), which may not necessarily capture changes in functional composition (Wang et al 2021), or indeed, distinguish greening and evergreening as functionally different processes (Vowles and Björk 2019).…”

“…Presently, however, crowberry proliferation, and its ecological and socio-economic impacts, remain poorly understood; this can impede development of novel management norms and objectives (Vaas et al 2021; Davis et al 2019). First, general acceptance and evidence-based baselines are often difficult to establish for slow and poorly detectable changes (Schneider, Leifeld, and Malang 2013), such as the creeping infilling and biomass accumulation of a slow-growing dwarf-shrub.…”