Biological invasions from ballast water are a severe environmental threat and exceedingly costly to society. We identify global hot spots of invasion based on worldwide patterns of ship traffic. We then estimate the rate of port-to-port invasion using gravity models for spatial interactions, and we identify bottlenecks to the regional exchange of species using the Ford-Fulkerson algorithm for n...

© The Ecological Society of America www.frontiersinecology.org B invasions, a major and increasing agent of global biodiversity change, are often the result of inadvertent releases from trade and travel pathways (Levine et al. 2003; Ruiz and Carlton 2003; Drake and Lodge 2004). Empirical and theoretical evidence indicate that invasion risk can be decreased by reducing propagule pressure, specif...

Transporting non-native species in ballast tanks has been a major challenge over the years. The number of surviving host environment is quite small compared to those all introduced. However, even single can cause great harm environment, economy, and public health. Ballast water treatment issues are difficult complex as performance highly affected by variable characteristics seawater. In additio...

Cyanobacteria blooms are a risk to environmental health and public safety due to the potent toxins certain cyanobacteria can produce. These nuisance organisms can be removed from water bodies by biomass flocculation and sedimentation. Here, we studied the efficacy of combinations of a low dose coagulant (poly-aluminium chloride-PAC-or chitosan) with different ballast compounds (red soil, bauxit...

In the present study, the ballast waters from 24 ships arriving at Shahid Rajaee Port in Bandar Abbas, Hormozgan Province, Iran, were studied in two warm and cold seasons (summer 2017 and winter 2018). The zooplankton sampling was conducted under the MEPC 173(58) method, by bucket and using a 50-micron mesh to filter 300 liters of ballast water. In total, 57 zooplankton species, belonging to 8 ...

Most of the marine pollution attributable to ship actions is associated with the illicit discharge of oily residues or ballast water, in what is commonly termed operational pollution. In the particular case of ballast water, careless disposal can lead to severe ecological damage, including the irreversible establishment of communities of invasive species. In its 2004 Convention on ballast water...