TY  - JOUR
A1  - Schindler, Stefan
A1  - Staska, Bernadette
A1  - Adam, Mildren
A1  - Rabitsch, Wolfgang
A1  - Essl, Franz
T1  - Alien species and public health impacts in Europe: a literature review
T2  - NeoBiota
N2  - Impacts of alien species on human health have recently become a major issue in medical research and invasion ecology, but comprehensive assessments of this subject are largely lacking. Here, we provide a literature review of alien species with public health impacts in Europe based on a systematic search in the Thomson Reuters Web of Science. We detected 77 relevant articles, of which 21 were reviews and 56 were original research articles. The taxonomic focus was on vascular plants (n=31 articles) and dipterans (n=25 articles). The original research articles mainly covered the spread of the study species, while early invasion stages (introduction, establishment) as well as impact and management were less investigated. Alien species of health concern in Europe are mostly introduced as contaminants, and mostly originate from climatically similar regions of the Northern Hemisphere. In those cases (36% of all articles) when information on the trend in range and abundance was provided, this trend was mostly increasing. We detected little information on the severity of the impacts (two articles) and the interaction with climate change (three articles). In 15 original articles (28%) specific management measures were suggested, in only one article the socioeconomic costs were assessed. We conclude that European research on human health impacts of alien species is biased towards few species, and that several important aspects such as early invasion stages, severity of impact and its temporal trends, and the scale of the socioeconomic costs caused are poorly understood. Interdisciplinary projects bridging gaps between ecologists medical researchers, socioeconomists and public health authorities are required to link alien species to severity and trends of impacts, which is a crucial requisite for risk assessment and decision making.
KW  - Aedes
KW  - Ambrosia
KW  - climate change
KW  - human health
KW  - management
KW  - vector
Y1  - 2015
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/45501
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-455019
VL  - 2015
IS  - 27
SP  - 1
EP  - 23
ER  -