Climate change is making it easier for invasive species to succeed

In 2017, Hurricane Maria made landfall on Puerto Rico with maximum sustained winds of 250 kilometres an hour.

It devastated communities and infrastructure, was associated with nearly 3,000 deaths and caused tens of billions of dollars in losses.

The storm was a disaster for nature too.

On land, severe forest damage led to dramatic declines in forest birds .

In the sea, storms moved large amounts of sand and mud across the seafloor, burying and destroying native shallow seagrass meadows .

However, amid all this destruction, some species not only survived, but thrived.

One example is the invasive Halophila stipulacea , a seagrass native to the Red Sea and Indian Ocean that has been introduced to the Caribbean and the coast of the continental United States through human activities.

Invasive species are those that have never occurred in an area before but have been brought there by humans.

Once established, they proliferate and spread to other regions like an advancing wave that is difficult to stop.

Following the storm, the invasive seagrass rapidly recovered and spread throughout the shallow Caribbean seascape, reaching dominance in some areas.

This single invasive species has the potential to substantially alter fish communities that depend on a diversity of native seagrasses for shelter.

Read more: Invasive species are reshaping aquatic ecosystems, one lake at a time Invasive species and climate change Climate change may not have caused Hurricane Maria, but this example illustrates how extreme events can damage native communities and create opportunities for invasive species to spread.

In our recently published study , we examined the hypothesis that climate change can boost invasion potential by systematically reviewing the literature and quantifying the evidence in a meta-analysis involving 67 studies across 30 marine invasive species.

Across the studies we examined, climate change generally increased the abundance or establishment of invasive species, but the strength of this relationship varied among species, environmental conditions and study designs.