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During the NEOBIOTA conference 2010 in Copenhagen (see http://www.neobiota.eu/conferences for an overview of all conferences), the attendants decided to transform the serial of the European Group on Biological Invasions Neobiota, edited by Ingo Kowarik and Uwe Starfinger, into an international, open access journal. In the following year, NeoBiota was relaunched under the same name, but with an upper case 'B', by Pensoft Publishers. In the editorial of the first issue, a large group of co-editors claimed for openness in covering a broad range of issues in invasion science, including the intersections with applied and social sciences, and referring to different groups of taxa and geographical regions (Kühn et al. 2011). What happened since then? We think that it is now time to shortly reflect how the new NeoBiota journal has developed in the first years of its infancy – based on some data on the published papers, the addressed topics and the geographical background of our contributing authors.
Prioritization of introduction pathways is seen as an important component of the management of biological invasions. We address whether established alien plants, mammals, freshwater fish and terrestrial invertebrates with known ecological impacts are associated with particular introduction pathways (release, escape, contaminant, stowaway, corridor and unaided). We used the information from the European alien species database DAISIE (www.europe-aliens.org) supplemented by the EASIN catalogue (European Alien Species Information Network), and expert knowledge. Plants introduced by the pathways release, corridor and unaided were disproportionately more likely to have ecological impacts than those introduced as contaminants. In contrast, impacts were not associated with particular introduction pathways for invertebrates, mammals or fish. Thus, while for plants management strategies should be targeted towards the appropriate pathways, for animals, management should focus on reducing the total number of taxa introduced, targeting those pathways responsible for high numbers of introductions. However, regardless of taxonomic group, having multiple introduction pathways increases the likelihood of the species having an ecological impact. This may simply reflect that species introduced by multiple pathways have high propagule pressure and so have a high probability of establishment. Clearly, patterns of invasion are determined by many interacting factors and management strategies should reflect this complexity.
The Editorial presents the focus, scope, policies, and the inaugural issue of NeoBiota, a new open access peer-reviewed journal of biological invasions. The new journal NeoBiota is a continuation of the former NEOBIOTA publication series. The journal will deal with all aspects of invasion biology and impose no restrictions on manuscript size neither on use of color. NeoBiota implies an XML-based editorial workflow and several cutting-edge innovations in publishing and dissemination, such as semantic markup of and enhancements to published texts, data publication, and extensive cross-linking within the journal and to external sources.