Revisions of the Fish Invasiveness Screening Kit (FISK) for its Application in Warmer Climatic Zones, with Particular Reference to Peninsular Florida

Abstract

The initial version (v1) of the Fish Invasiveness Scoring Kit (FISK) was adapted from the Weed Risk Assessment of Pheloung, Williams, and Halloy to assess the potential invasiveness of nonnative freshwater fishes in the United Kingdom. Published applications of FISK v1 have been primarily in temperate-zone countries (Belgium, Belarus, and Japan), so the specificity of this screening tool to that climatic zone was not noted until attempts were made to apply it in peninsular Florida. To remedy this shortcoming, the questions and guidance notes of FISK v1 were reviewed and revised to improve clarity and extend its applicability to broader climatic regions, resulting in changes to 36 of the 49 questions. In addition, upgrades were made to the software architecture of FISK to improve overall computational speed as well as graphical user interface flexibility and friendliness. We demonstrate the process of screening a fish species using FISK v2 in a realistic management scenario by assessing the Barcoo grunter Scortum barcoo (Terapontidae), a species whose management concerns are related to its potential use for aquaponics in Florida. The FISK v2 screening of Barcoo grunter placed the species into the lower range of medium risk (score = 5), suggesting it is a permissible species for use in Florida under current nonnative species regulations. Screening of the Barcoo grunter illustrates the usefulness of FISK v2 as a proactive tool serving to inform risk management decisions, but the low level of confidence associated with the assessment highlighted a dearth of critical information on this species.

Comparison of Taxon‐Specific and Taxon‐Generic Risk Screening Tools to Identify Potentially Invasive Non‐native Fishes in the River Neretva Catchment (Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia)

“…The present study aims to determine which non‐native fish species are likely to pose a high risk of being invasive for the River Neretva catchment and for similar ecosystems of the Adriatic and Mediterranean regions. Another objective was to compare two decision support tools (available at http://www.cefas.co.uk/nns/tools/), namely, FISK v2 (Lawson et al ., ) and the Aquatic Species Invasiveness Screening Kit (AS‐ISK: Copp et al , ), which was recently developed to replace the taxon‐specific toolkits of the FISK family (Copp, ). Similar to FISK v2, AS‐ISK can be applied in virtually any climatic zone.…”

“…Risk analysis of non‐native fish species in inland waters of the Mediterranean Region and adjacent areas has so far involved only risk identification (screening), which has employed the Freshwater Fish Invasiveness Screening Kit (FISK: Copp et al , , ; Lawson et al , ). In its application to the Balkans Region (Simonović et al , ), a high rate of fish translocations into newly constructed reservoirs was reported, and this was the likely cause of the relatively low threshold FISK score achieved (Copp, ), which distinguishes between ‘medium‐risk’ and ‘high‐risk’ species, compared with areas with a similar level of endemism, namely, the Iberian Peninsula (threshold = 20.25: Almeida et al , ) and Turkey (threshold = 23: Tarkan et al , ).…”

Colonisation of the Rhine basin by non-native gobiids: an update of the situation in France

“…Assessments were carried out by a single assessor (N.P.) using the calibrated version of the FISK (v2.03), which is freely available for download (Lawson et al, 2012). The critical thresholds for categorising fish species as low, medium or high risk of being invasive have been calibrated by Copp et al (2009), whereby scores <1 indicate low risk, scores of 1 to 18.9 indicate medium risk, and scores of 19 (to a maximum of 54) indicate high risk.…”

First application in Turkey of the European Non‐native Species in Aquaculture Risk Analysis Scheme to evaluate the farmed non‐native fish, striped catfish Pangasianodon hypophthalmus

“…Assessments using ENSARS begin with the Pre‐screening module (Copp, Russell, et al, ), which originally comprised a suite of taxon‐specific toolkits and a generic screening module. Since ENSARS’ creation, the generic screening module was combined with the architecture of version 2 (Lawson, Vilizzi, Hill, Hardin, & Copp, ) of the Fish Invasiveness Screening Kit (FISK: Copp et al, ; Vilizzi et al, ) to create the Aquatic Species Invasiveness Screening Kit (AS‐ISK: Copp, Vilizzi, et al, ). The schemes upon which ENSARS was based (cited here above) have been slightly modified, and the AS‐ISK was developed, to comply with the “minimum standards” (Roy et al, ) for evaluating NN species risks under Council Regulation No 1143/2014 on the prevention and management of alien invasive species (EU, ).…”