The 2004 Japanese 'Invasive Alien Species Act' was enacted to control invasive alien species and prevent the damage that they cause to ecosystems. The Act defines invasive alien species as those recognised as, or suspected of, causing damage to ecosystems, human safety, agriculture, forestry and fisheries. Invasive alien species are carefully regulated: raising, planting, keeping or transportin...

Alien predators have on average twice the impact on native prey populations than do native predators, and are a severe threat to wildlife globally. Manipulation experiments can be used to quantify the impact of an alien predator on its prey population/s, but unless the results are compared to benchmarks, it is unclear whether this impact is indeed greater than that of a native predator. Here we...

Road and railway networks are pervasive elements of all environments, which have expanded intensively over the last century in all European countries. These transportation infrastructures have major impacts on the surrounding landscape, representing a threat to biodiversity. Roadsides and railways may function as corridors for dispersal of alien species in fragmented landscapes. However, only f...

We present an experiment with HERMAN [9], a real-time music generator. HERMAN was designed to enrich the sensory environment of GhostWriter, an immersive educational tool. The aim of thus enhancing GhostWriter’s virtual environment, was to offer a more convincing sense of presence, to motivate and stimulate users. HERMAN supplies continuous, manipulable music. It has an input parameter which, i...

The Nature Conservancy of Hawai`i is currently (1989) engaged in active alien plant control on two large montane forest and shrubland preserves on the islands of Moloka`i and Maui. The national Conservancy organization is in the process of developing comprehensive guidelines for the use of pesticides in alien species control and is producing an Element Stewardship Abstract database to assemble ...

Invasive alien species cause major changes to ecosystem functioning and patterns of biodiversity, and the main factors involved in invasion success remain contested. Using the Mediterranean island of Crete, Greece as a case study, we suggest a framework for analyzing spatial data of alien species distributions, based on environmental predictors, aiming to gain an understanding of their spatial ...

A Special Ecological Areas approach to alien plant management was adopted at Hawai`i Volcanoes National Park in 1985. The approach involves control of widespread, disruptive alien plant species in Special Ecological Areas, which are intensive management and research units in the Park. Special Ecological Areas management developed from these perceptions: 1) unmanaged alien species were affecting...

Breath has a realist function in most artistic media. It serves to remind the reader, the viewer or the spectator of the exigencies of the body. In science fiction (SF) literature and films, breath is often a plot device for human encounters with otherness, either with alien peoples, who may not breathe oxygen, or environments, where there may not be oxygen to breathe. But while there is a tech...

An overview is presented of the metazoan alien biota recorded from the Mediterranean coast of Israel. Of the 296 alien species, 284 have been introduced from the Red Sea/Indo West-Pacific through the Suez Canal. A brief history of the research on introduced species along the Israeli coast is presented along with the list of species, and their ecological and economic impacts are discussed.

Background and purpose: Invasion by alien plant species is considered as one of major threats to biodiversity. Actual invasion of different habitats in particular country is important for understanding processes that are important in invasion ecology as well as for the nature conservation. Materials and methods: Vegetation relevés stored in a database Vegetation of Slovenia were translated into...