Horticultural trade is the primary pathway for the introduction of invasive plant species. Increasingly, trade is conducted online via e-commerce platforms. We used automated web scraping to capture snapshots of the online plant trade in Australia across 11 e-commerce websites between 2020 and 2023, aiming to identify potentially invasive species for sale. We identified 3,822 species for sale, which we categorised based on the...

The terrestrial invertebrate trade in Australia is both poorly researched and largely exempt from regulation, despite numerous conservation and biosecurity risks. To determine the extent and implications of this trade, we conducted systematic monitoring of domestic invertebrate sales between 2019 and 2025, spanning online and physical marketplaces. Platforms surveyed included social media groups, pet store websites, public cla...

Biodiversity monitoring programs and citizen science data remain heavily biased toward the Global North. Especially in megadiverse countries with limited biodiversity records, incorporating social media data can help address existing data gaps. However, whether such data can significantly improve our understanding of range‐shifting species is still unknown. We tested whether social media data improved our knowledge of the rang...

A species' success during the invasion of new areas hinges on an interplay between the demographic processes common to invasions and the specific ecological context of the novel environment. Evolutionary genetic studies of invasive species can investigate how genetic bottlenecks and ecological conditions shape genetic variation in invasions, and our study pairs two invasive populations that are hypothesized to be from the same...

Trace DNA detection methods are increasingly applied to biomonitoring, in conservation, biosecurity, and wildlife forensic sciences. Reptiles are high risk invasive alien species that can cause damaging environmental impacts, yet the dynamics around terrestrial reptile DNA deposition and subsequent detection are poorly understood. Concerns around the role of the pet trade in introducing key reptile pests have resulted in calls...

Gene drives are genetic elements with positively biased transmission and may be useful tools to suppress mammalian pests that threaten biodiversity worldwide. While gene drives are progressing in mice, less is known about their potential for invasive rat control. A recent report has provided the first data on germline gene conversion in rats, demonstrating that modest homing rates (up to 67%) can be achieved in females. Here,...

Reptiles and amphibians are popular in the exotic pet trade, where Australian species are valued for their rarity and uniqueness. Despite a near‐complete ban on the export of Australian wildlife, smuggling and subsequent international trade frequently occur in an unregulated and unmonitored manner. In 2022, Australia listed over 100 squamates in Appendix III of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wil...

The ever‐increasing and expanding globalisation of trade and transport underpins the escalating global problem of biological invasions. Developing biosecurity infrastructures is crucial to anticipate and prevent the transport and introduction of invasive alien species. Still, robust and defensible forecasts of potential invaders are rare, especially for species without known invasion history. Here, we aim to support decision‐m...

The ecological impact of non‐native species arises from their establishment in local assemblages. However, the rates of non‐native spread in new regions and their determinants have not been comprehensively studied. Here, we combined global databases documenting the occurrence of non‐native species and residence of non‐native birds, mammals, and vascular plants at regional and local scales to describe how the likelihood of non‐...

The spread of nonindigenous species by shipping is a large and growing global problem that harms coastal ecosystems and economies and may blur coastal biogeographical patterns. This study coupled eukaryotic environmental DNA (eDNA) metabarcoding with dissimilarity regression to test the hypothesis that ship‐borne species spread homogenizes port communities. We first collected and metabarcoded water samples from ports in Europe...

The international wildlife trade presents severe conservation and environmental security risks, yet no international regulatory framework exists to monitor the trade of species not listed in the appendices of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES). We explored the composition and dynamics of internationally regulated versus nonregulated trade, with a focus on importations of...

Spatial capture–recapture (SCR) models have emerged as a robust method to estimate the population density of mobile animals. However, model evaluation has generally been based on data simulated from simplified representations of animal space use. Here, we generated data from animal movement simulated from a mechanistic individual‐based model, in which movement emerges from the individual's response to a changing environment (i...

Invasive alien species continue to threaten global biodiversity. CRISPR‐based gene drives, which can theoretically spread through populations despite imparting a fitness cost, could be used to suppress or eradicate pest populations. We develop an individual‐based, spatially explicit, stochastic model to simulate the ability of CRISPR‐based homing and X chromosome shredding drives to eradicate populations of invasive house mice...