Aquatic invasive species are one of the biggest threats to biodiversity in the oceans. One of the main measures within marine strategies to preserve biological diversity is to establish marine protected areas (MPA). MPAs are areas with high biological diversity, and it is therefore important to establish effective management strategies for these areas.
This project will investigate the climate-induced spread of invasive alien species (IAS) to MPAs in the North-East Atlantic (North Sea, Skagerrak and Kattegat).
In the area between Denmark, Sweden and Norway, several ocean current systems merge and maritime traffic is intense. A regional approach will be developed with the aim of producing a general concept for transnational mitigation work regarding invasive alien species.
The samples are now analyzed in two ways, partly with a technique to find individual species, partly to scan all species in the surroundings.
The method for detecting single species generally gave weak signals for the desired species, which indicated that the method can be improved.
The analysis of the data from the broad species scan indicates that the method used is robust.
The results say that while some invasive species are detected in new places, including in or near marine protected areas, most are not yet found to have spread much beyond their first recorded distribution in the investigated area.
New samples from 2025 are being analysed this fall which will bring up-to-date data and an understanding on how the last two years of climate change has had an impact on recent invasive species distribution.
