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Biological invasions, as a result of human intervention through trade and mobility, are the second biggest cause of biodiversity loss. The impacts of invasive alien species (IAS) on the environment are well known, however, economic impacts are poorly estimated, especially in mega-diverse countries where both economic and ecological consequences of these effects can be catastrophic. Ecuador, one of the smallest mega-diverse countries, lacks a comprehensive description of the economic costs of IAS within its territory. Here, using "InvaCost", a public database that compiles all recorded monetary costs associated with IAS from English and Non-English sources, we investigated the economic costs of biological invasions. We found that between 1983 and 2017, the reported costs associated with biological invasions ranged between US$86.17 million (when considering only the most robust data) and US$626 million (when including all cost data) belonging to 37 species and 27 genera. Furthermore, 99% of the recorded cost entries were from the Galapagos Islands. From only robust data, the costliest identified taxonomic group was feral goats (Capra hircus; US$20 million), followed by Aedes mosquitoes (US$2.14 million) while organisms like plant species from the genus Rubus, a parasitic fly (Philornis downsi), black rats (Rattus rattus) and terrestrial gastropods (Achatina fulica) represented less than US$2 million each. Costs of "mixed-taxa" (i.e. plants and animals) represented the highest (61% of total robust costs; US$52.44 million). The most impacted activity sector was the national park authorities, which spent about US$84 million. Results from robust data also revealed that management expenditures were the major type of costs recorded in the Galapagos Islands; however, costs reported for medical losses related to Aedes mosquitoes causing dengue fever in mainland Ecuador would have ranked first if more detailed information had allowed us to categorize them as robust data. Over 70% of the IAS reported for Ecuador did not have reported costs. These results suggest that costs reported here are a massive underestimate of the actual economic toll of invasions in the country.

Invasive alien species (IAS) are a leading driver of biodiversity loss worldwide, and have negative impacts on human societies. In most countries, available data on monetary costs of IAS are scarce, while being crucial for developing efficient management. In this study, we use available data collected from the first global assessment of economic costs of IAS (InvaCost) to quantify and describe the economic cost of invasions in Mexico. This description was made across a range of taxonomic, sectoral and temporal variables, and allowed us to identify knowledge gaps within these areas. Overall, costs of invasions in Mexico were estimated at US$ 5.33 billion (i.e., 109) ($MXN 100.84 billion) during the period from 1992 to 2019. Biological invasion costs were split relatively evenly between aquatic (US$ 1.16 billion; $MXN 21.95 billion) and terrestrial (US$ 1.17 billion; $MXN 22.14 billion) invaders, but semi-aquatic taxa dominated (US$ 2.99 billion; $MXN 56.57 billion), with costs from damages to resources four times higher than those from management of IAS (US$ 4.29 billion vs. US$ 1.04 billion; $MXN 81.17 billion vs $MXN 19.68 billion). The agriculture sector incurred the highest costs (US$ 1.01 billion; $MXN 19.1 billion), followed by fisheries (US$ 517.24 million; $MXN 9.79 billion), whilst most other costs simultaneously impacted mixed or unspecified sectors. When defined, costs to Mexican natural protected areas were mostly associated with management actions in terrestrial environments, and were incurred through official authorities via monitoring, control or eradication. On natural protected islands, mainly mammals were managed (i.e. rodents, cats and goats), to a total of US$ 3.99 million, while feral cows, fishes and plants were mostly managed in protected mainland areas, amounting to US$ 1.11 million in total.Pterygoplichthyssp. andEichhornia crassipescaused the greatest reported costs in unprotected aquatic ecosystems in Mexico, andBemisia tabacito terrestrial systems. Although reported damages from invasions appeared to be fluctuating through time in Mexico, management spending has been increasing. These estimates, albeit conservative, underline the monetary pressure that invasions put on the Mexican economy, calling for urgent actions alongside comprehensive cost reporting in national states such as Mexico.

Invasive alien species are responsible for a high economic impact on many sectors worldwide. Nevertheless, there is a scarcity of studies assessing these impacts in Central and South America. Investigating costs of invasions is important to motivate and guide policy responses by increasing stakeholders’ awareness and identifying action priorities. Here, we used the InvaCost database to investigate (i) the geographical pattern of biological invasion costs across the region; (ii) the monetary expenditure across taxa and impacted sectors; and (iii) the taxa responsible for more than 50% of the costs (hyper-costly taxa) per impacted sector and type of costs. The total of reliable and observed costs reported for biological invasions in Central and South America was USD 102.5 billion between 1975 and 2020, but about 90% of the total costs were reported for only three countries (Brazil, Argentina and Colombia). Costs per species were associated with geographical regions (i.e., South America, Central America and Islands) and with the area of the countries in km2. Most of the expenses were associated with damage costs (97.8%), whereas multiple sectors (77.4%), agriculture (15%) and public and social welfare (4.2%) were the most impacted sectors. Aedes spp. was the hyper-costly taxon for the terrestrial environment (costs of USD 25 billion) and water hyacinth (Eichhornia crassipes) was the hyper-costly taxon for the aquatic environment (USD 179.9 million). Six taxa were classified as hyper-costly for at least one impacted sector and two taxa for at least one type of cost. In conclusion, invasive alien species caused billions of dollars of economic burden in Central and South America, mainly in large countries of South America. Costs caused by invasive alien species were unevenly distributed across countries, impacted sectors, types of costs and taxa (hyper-costly taxa). These results suggest that impacted sectors should drive efforts to manage the species that are draining financial sources.

International audience; Global insect decline has recently become a cause for major concern, particularly in the tropics where the vast majority of species occurs. Deforestation is suggested as being a major driver of this decline, but how anthropogenic changes in landscape structure affect tropical insect communities has rarely been addressed. We sampled Saturniidae and Sphingidae moths on 27 farms located in Brazilian Amazonia (Para state) and characterised by different deforestation histories. We used functional traits (forewing length, body mass, wing load, trophic niche breadth and resource use strategy), analysed by combining RLQ and null model analyses, to investigate the responses of their taxonomic and functional diversity to landscape change dynamics and current structure. We found that communities had a higher proportion of large and polyphagous species with low wing load in landscapes with low forest quality and relative cover and high land use turnover. This was mainly due to a significant response to deforestation by saturniids, whereas the more mobile sphingids showed no significant landscape-related pattern. We also observed an overall increase of species richness and functional dispersion in landscapes that have been deforested for a long time when compared with more recent agricultural settlements. Our results highlight the complex way in which landscape structure and historical dynamics interact to shape Neotropical moth communities and that saturniid moths respond clearly to the structure of the surrounding landscape, confirming their potential use as an indicator group for environmental monitoring programmes.

AIM: We test hypotheses on the environmental control of elevational richness patterns of sphingid moths for their global applicability and generality. Specifically, we compare effects of area with climate‐related drivers, such as primary productivity and temperature, while also considering direct effects of precipitation. MAJOR TAXA: Sphingid moths (Lepidoptera). LOCATION: Eighty‐six mountain ranges of the Old World and the Australia/Pacific region, from Scandinavia and Siberia through the African and Australasian tropics to South Africa and Southern Australia. METHODS: We used a large compilation of point locality records for 744 species, in addition to fine‐grained range maps derived from species distribution modelling of these records, to characterize the elevational pattern of species richness in 86 custom‐delineated mountain regions. For both types of data, we compared the effects of environmental drivers on richness by comparing standardized coefficients of multivariate models for pooled data after accounting for between‐region variation in richness. RESULTS: We observed varying patterns of elevational richness across the research region, with a higher prevalence of midpeaks in arid regions. We found overwhelming support for area as a main determinant of richness, modulated by temperature and productivity, whereas we detected no effect of precipitation. MAIN CONCLUSIONS: Area, productivity and temperature are the main environmental predictors explaining a large proportion of variability in sphingid richness. This is consistent not only with other elevational studies, but also with empirical and theoretical biodiversity research in a non‐elevational context (with the caveat of some unresolved issues in elevational area effects). However, distinct differences in elevational patterns remain even within the same mountain ranges when comparing with other Lepidoptera, that is, geometrid moths, which highlights the importance of understanding higher clade differentiation in ecological responses, within insects and in other groups.

Economic assessments for invasive alien species (IAS) are an urgent requirement for informed decision-making, coordinating and motivating the allocation of economic and human resources for the management of IAS. We searched for economic costs of IAS occurring in Spain, by using the InvaCost database and requesting data to regional governments and national authorities, which resulted in over 3,000 cost entries. Considering only robust data (i.e. excluding extrapolated, potential (not-incurred or expected) and low reliability costs), economic costs in Spain were estimated at US$ 261 million (€ 232 million) from 1997 to 2022. There was an increase from US$ 4 million per year before 2000 to US$ 15 million per year in the last years (from € 4 to 13 million). Robust data showed that most reported costs of IAS in Spain (> 90%) corresponded to management costs, while damage costs were only found for 2 out of the 174 species with reported costs. Economic costs relied mostly on regional and inter-regional administrations that spent 66% of costs in post-invasion management actions, contrary to all international guidelines, which recommend investing more in prevention. Regional administrations unequally reported costs. Moreover, 36% of the invasive species, reported to incur management costs, were not included in national or European regulations (i.e. Black Lists), suggesting the need to review these policies; besides, neighbouring regions seem to manage different groups of species. We suggest the need of a national lead agency to effectively coordinate actions, facilitate communication and collaboration amongst regional governments, national agencies and neighbouring countries. This will motivate the continuity of long-lasting management actions and the increase in efforts to report IAS costs by regional and inter-regional managers which will adequately provide information for future budgets gaining management effectiveness.

The ever-increasing number of introduced species profoundly threatens global biodiversity. While the ecological and evolutionary consequences of invasive alien species are receiving increasing attention, their economic impacts have largely remained understudied, especially in France. Here, we aimed at providing a general overview of the monetary losses (damages caused by) and expenditures (management of) associated with invasive alien species in France. This country has a long history of alien species presence, partly due to its long-standing global trade activities, highly developed tourism, and presence of overseas territories in different regions of the globe, resulting in a conservative minimum of 2,750 introduced and invasive alien species. By synthesizing for the first time the monetary losses and expenditures incurred by invasive alien species in Metropolitan France and French overseas territories, we obtained 1,583 cost records for 98 invasive alien species. We found that they caused a conservative total amount ranging between US$ 1,280 million and 11,535 million in costs over the period 1993–2018. We extrapolated costs for species invading France, for which costs were reported in other countries but not in France, which yielded an additional cost ranging from US$ 151 to 3,030 millions. Damage costs were nearly eight times higher than management expenditure. Insects, and in particular the Asian tiger mosquito Aedes albopictus and the yellow fever mosquito Ae. aegypti, totalled very high economic costs, followed by non-graminoid terrestrial flowering and aquatic plants (Ambrosia artemisiifolia, Ludwigia sp. and Lagarosiphon major). Over 90% of alien species currently recorded in France had no costs reported in the literature, resulting in high biases in taxonomic, regional and activity sector coverages. To conclude, we report alarming costs and even more alarming knowledge gaps. Our results should raise awareness of the importance of biosecurity and biosurveillance in France, and beyond, as well as the crucial need for better reporting and documentation of cost data.

Invasive alien species (IAS) affect natural ecosystems and services fundamental to human well-being, human health and economies. However, the economic costs associated with IAS have been less studied than other impacts. This information can be particularly important for developing countries such as Argentina, where monetary resources for invasion management are scarce and economic costs are more impactful. The present study provides the first analysis of the economic cost of IAS in Argentina at the national level, using the InvaCost database (expanded with new data sources in Spanish), the first global compilation of the reported economic costs of invasions. We analyzed the temporal development of invasions costs, distinguishing costs according to the method reliability (i.e. reproducibility of the estimation methodology) and describing the economic costs of invasions by invaded environment, cost type, activity sector affected and taxonomic group of IAS. The total economic cost of IAS in Argentina between 1995 and 2019 was estimated at US$ 6,908 million. All costs were incurred and 93% were highly reliable. The recorded costs were mainly related to terrestrial environments and the agricultural sector, with lack of costs in other sectors, making it difficult to discuss the actual distribution of invasion costs in Argentina. Nevertheless, the reported costs of IAS in this country are very high and yet likely much underestimated due to important data gaps and biases in the literature. Considering that Argentina has an underdeveloped economy, costs associated with biological invasions should be taken into consideration for preventing invasions, and to achieve a more effective use of available resources.

International audience; AimFuture climate changes may affect species distribution and their genetic diversity, hampering species adaptation to a new climate or tracking the suitable conditions. Amphibians have high sensitivity to environmental degradation and changes in temperature and humidity. Thus, the expected climatic changes by the end-of-century (EOC 2100) may cause local or complete extinction of some species. Here, we address the effects of climate change on genetic and phylogeographical diversity, together with the geographical distribution of the South American treefrog Scinax squalirostris Lutz, 1925. Furthermore, we assess how protected areas will conserve its genetic variation.LocationSouth America.MethodsWe combined Ecological Niche Modelling and genetic simulations to predict the effects of climate change on the geographical distribution, genetic diversity, structure and phylogeographical diversity of Scinax squalirostris, using two scenarios of CO2 emission. We also performed a spatial analysis to investigate the effectiveness of the current Protected Areas (PAs) to preserve the species’ genetic and phylogeographical diversity.ResultsScinax squalirostris' geographical range will potentially increase in the future due to the expansion of suitable areas towards its southern distribution, despite the shrinking of suitable areas in the northern part of its current distribution. Besides the shifts in suitable areas, our findings point to a genetic homogenization across the geographical range of S. squalirostris due to the displacement and loss of genetic ancestry clusters. Although existing PAs are conserving the current genetic diversity, they conserve less phylogeographical diversity than expected by chance. Scinax squalirostris may shift its distribution into areas with lower number of PAs, compromising its future conservation.Main conclusionsClimate change will potentially increase S. squalirostris range size, however, not towards regions where most of the current established PAs are located, hence driving to homogenization and loss of genetic diversity, and leading to a gap of conservation within PAs.

Invasive species can have severe impacts on ecosystems, economies, and human health. Though the economic impacts of invasions provide important foundations for management and policy, up-to-date syntheses of these impacts are lacking. To produce the most comprehensive estimate of invasive species costs within North America (including the Greater Antilles) to date, we synthesized economic impact data from the recently published InvaCost database. Here, we report that invasions have cost the North American economy at least US$ 1.26 trillion between 1960 and 2017. Economic costs have climbed over recent decades, averaging US$ 2 billion per year in the early 1960s to over US$ 26 billion per year in the 2010s. Of the countries within North America, the United States (US) had the highest recorded costs, even after controlling for research effort within each country ($5.81 billion per cost source in the US). Of the taxa and habitats that could be classified in our database, invasive vertebrates were associated with the greatest costs, with terrestrial habitats incurring the highest monetary impacts. In particular, invasive species cumulatively (from 1960–2017) cost the agriculture and forestry sectors US$ 527.07 billion and US$ 34.93 billion, respectively. Reporting issues (e.g., data quality or taxonomic granularity) prevented us from synthesizing data from all available studies. Furthermore, very few of the known invasive species in North America had reported economic costs. Therefore, while the costs to the North American economy are massive, our US$ 1.26 trillion estimate is likely very conservative. Accordingly, expanded and more rigorous economic cost reports are necessary to provide more comprehensive invasion impact estimates, and then support data-based management decisions and actions towards species invasions.

International audience; Background: Herbivorous insects represent a major fraction of global biodiversity and the relationships they have established with their food plants range from strict specialists to broad generalists. Our knowledge of these relationships is of primary importance to basic (e.g. the study of insect ecology and evolution) and applied biology (e.g. monitoring of pest or invasive species) and yet remains very fragmentary and understudied. In Lepidoptera, caterpillars of families Saturniidae and Sphingidae are rather well known and considered to have adopted contrasting preferences in their use of food plants. The former are regarded as being rather generalist feeders, whereas the latter are more specialist. New information: To assemble and synthesise the vast amount of existing data on food plants of Lepidoptera families Saturniidae and Sphingidae, we combined three major existing databases to produce a dataset collating more than 26,000 records for 1256 species (25% of all species) in 121 (67%) and 167 (81%) genera of Saturniidae and Sphingidae, respectively. This dataset is used here to document the level of polyphagy of each of these genera using summary statistics, as well as the calculation of a polyphagy score derived from the analysis of Phylogenetic Diversity of the food plants used by the species in each genus.

Aim To map the spatial variation of range sizes within sphingid moths, and to test hypotheses on its environmental control. In particular, we investigate effects of climate change velocity since the Pleistocene and the mid-Holocene, temperature and precipitation seasonality, topography, Pleistocene ice cover, and available land area. Location Old World and Australasia, excluding smaller islands. Methods We used fine-grained range maps (based on expert-edited distribution modelling) for all 972 sphingid moth species in the research region and calculated, at a grain size of 100 km, the median of range sizes of all species that co-occur in a pixel. Climate, topography and Pleistocene ice cover data were taken from publicly available sources. We calculated climate change velocities (CCV) for the last 21 kyr as well as 6 kyr. We compared the effects of seasonality and CCV on median range sizes with spatially explicit models while accounting for effects of elevation range, glaciation history and available land area. Results Range sizes show a clear spatial pattern, with highest median values in deserts and arctic regions and lowest values in isolated tropical regions. Range sizes were only weakly related to absolute latitude (predicted by Rapoport's effect), but there was a strong north-south pattern of range size decline. Temperature seasonality emerged as the strongest environmental correlate of median range size, in univariate as well as multivariate models, whereas effects of CCV were weak and unstable for both time periods. These results were robust to variations in the parameters in alternative analyses, among them multivariate CCV. Main conclusions Temperature seasonality is a strong correlate of spatial range size variation, while effects of longer-term temperature change, as captured by CCV, received much weaker support.

Our knowledge of global biodiversity remains incomplete and beset by knowledge shortfalls affecting both the census of species (i.e. the Linnean shortfall) and our understanding of their distributions (i.e. the Wallacean shortfall; Hortal et al. 2015). While alarming rates of species extinction have been reported in most groups of organisms, our capacity to assess extinction threats is limited by these shortfalls and it has become imperative to optimize our use of existing information for the analyses of biodiversity data. There are two major challenges when integrating biodiversity data from heterogeneous sources to ultimately analyzing them: The frequent disparity in taxon names used to refer to the same organisms; Geographical inconsistencies on specimen information. The frequent disparity in taxon names used to refer to the same organisms; Geographical inconsistencies on specimen information. The first refers to disagreements about the taxon concepts attached to names alongside the different interpretations and applications (e.g. gender agreement in taxonomic names) of the existing nomenclatural rules that ensure universality and stability of scientific names. The development of new methods for species delineation, and in particular with the growing integration of genetic data in the practice of taxonomy (e.g. DNA barcoding; Ratnasingham and Hebert 2013), has increased our ability to discriminate closely related species. This enhances the resolution level at which biodiversity is documented, described and analyzed(Goldstein and DeSalle 2011). One frequent outcome is the redefinition of species boundaries; either through merging (synonymy) or splitting of previously recognized species. In understudied groups such as insects, the resulting inflation of names, sometimes provisional, further defies the reconciliation of names used by different sources. The second challenge refers to the completeness and accuracy of geographical information. Specimen records in biodiversity databases often lack GPS coordinates. Consequently we need to accurately infer the latitude and longitude from place names. Other frequent inaccuracies include erroneous georeferencing, imprecision and/or error in the location of a record (Soberón and Peterson 2004). Integration of data on the basis of taxon names and their geographic information is a major challenge that either results in excluding a significant number of records, or in merging incompatible records, leading to erroneous outcomes. Therefore, we have developed WF.ACTIAS, a computational workflow that gathers data from several sources and provides the user with tools to make objective and reproducible decisions to assign records to a consensus species name, while detecting and correcting geographical inconsistencies. Its main objective is to automate a process that can integrate information about nomenclature, taxon concepts and geographical information to reconcile taxon names from different sources. Here, we present the WF.ACTIAS workflow in the context of the analysis of diversity in two sister families of moths – the Saturniidae and Sphingidae. Species boundaries in these insects have been thoroughly and comprehensively revisited through the integration of DNA barcodes and we are tackling the reconciliation of taxon names in ca. 282 000 records of which more than 77 000 have DNA barcodes. The outcome of this data integration is essential to study patterns of biodiversity and distributions and sets the ground to extend this process to other groups of organisms.

Despite their vast diversity and vital ecological role, insects are notoriously underrepresented in biogeography and conservation, and key broad-scale ecological hypotheses about them remain untested – largely due to generally incomplete and very coarse spatial distribution knowledge. Integrating records from publications, field work and natural history collections, we used a mixture of species distribution models and expert estimates to provide geographic distributions and emergent richness patterns for all ca 1000 sphingid moth species found outside the Americas in high spatial detail. Total sphingid moth richness, the first for a higher insect group to be documented at this scale, shows distinct maxima in the wet tropics of Africa and the Oriental with notable decay toward Australasia. Using multivariate models controlling for spatial autocorrelation, we found that primary productivity is the dominant environmental variable associated with moth richness, while temperature, contrary to our predictions, is an unexpectedly weak predictor. This is in stark contrast to the importance we identify for temperature as a niche variable of individual species. Despite divergent life histories, both main sub-groups of moths exhibit these relationships. Tribal-level deconstruction of richness and climatic niche patterns indicate idiosyncratic effects of biogeographic history for some of the less species-rich tribes, which in some cases exhibit distinct richness peaks away from the tropics. The study confirms, for a diverse insect group, overall richness associations of remarkable similarity to those documented for vertebrates and highlights the significant within-taxon structure that underpins emergent macroecological patterns. Results do not, however, meet predictions from vertebrate-derived hypotheses on how thermoregulation affects the strength of temperature–richness effects. Our study thus broadens the taxonomic focus in this data-deficient discourse. Our procedures of processing incomplete, scattered distribution data are a template for application to other taxa and regions.

Aim To investigate the contribution to range filling, range extent and climatic niche space of species of information contained in the largest databank of digitized biodiversity data: the global biodiversity information facility (GBIF). We compared such information with a compilation of independent distributional data from natural history collections and other sources. Location Europe. Methods We used data for the hawkmoths (Lepidoptera, family Sphingidae) to assess three aspects of range information: (1) observed range filling in 100 km × 100 km grid cell squares, (2) observed European range extent and (3) observed climatic niche. Range extents were calculated as products of latitudinal and longitudinal extents. Areas derived from minimum convex polygons drawn onto a 2-dimensional niche space representing the two main axes of a principal component analysis (PCA) were used to calculate climatic niche space. Additionally, record-based permutation tests for niche differences were carried out. Results We found that GBIF provided many more distribution records than independent compilation efforts, but contributed less information on range filling, range extent and climatic niches of species. Main conclusions Although GBIF contributed relevant additional information, it is not yet an effective alternative to manual compilation and databasing of distributional records from collections and literature sources, at least in lesser-known taxa such as invertebrates. We discuss possible reasons for our findings, which may help shape GBIF strategies for providing more informative data.

AIM: Many taxa, especially invertebrates, remain biogeographically highly understudied and even baseline assessments are missing, with too limited and heterogeneous sampling being key reasons. Here we set out to assess the human geographic and associated environmental factors behind inventory completeness for the hawkmoths of Africa. We aim to separate the causes of differential sampling from those affecting gradients of species richness to illustrate a potential general avenue for advancing knowledge about diversity in understudied groups. Location Sub-Saharan Africa. METHODS: Using a database of distributional records of hawkmoths, we computed rarefaction curves and estimated total species richness across 200 km × 200 km grid cells. We fitted multivariate models to identify environmental predictors of species richness and used environmental co-kriging to map region-wide diversity patterns. We estimated cell-wide inventory completeness from observed and estimated data, and related these to human geographic factors. RESULTS: Observed patterns of hawkmoths species richness are strongly determined by the number of available records in grid cells. Both show spatially structured distributions. Variables describing vegetation type, emerge as important predictors of estimated total richness, and variables capturing heat, energy availability and topographic heterogeneity all show a strong positive relationship. Patterns of interpolated richness identify three centres of diversity: Cameroon coastal mountains, and the northern and southern East African montane areas. Inventory completeness is positively influenced by population density, accessibility, protected areas and colonial history. Species richness is still under-recorded in the western Congo Basin and southern Tanzania/Mozambique. MAIN CONCLUSIONS: Sampling effort is highly biased and controlling for it in large-scale compilations of presence-only data is critical for drawing inferences from our still limited knowledge of invertebrate distributions. Our study shows that a baseline of estimate of broad-scale diversity patterns in understudied taxa can be derived from combining numerical estimators of richness, models of main environmental effects and spatial interpolation. Inventory completeness can be partly predicted from human geographic features and such models may offer fruitful guidance for prioritization of future sampling to further refine and validate estimated patterns of species richness.

Agrius cingulata (Lepidoptera, Sphingidae) is widespread in the Americas, but has recently begun to spread into Africa. In parts of its native range, the species is a pest of sweet potato, which is an important crop plant in Africa. We used two types of ecological niche models, based on native distribution records and climate and vegetation structure data, to estimate which regions of Africa are potentially suitable for the species to become established. The results show that, under the simplifying assumption that the species will occupy the same ecological niche in Africa as in its native range, A. cingulata may find a suitable habitat across wide stretches of sub-Saharan Africa. We conclude that early monitoring programmes of the spread and actual status of the species in Africa may be worthwhile implementing.

Many amphibian lineages show terrestrialization of their reproductive strategy and breeding is partially or completely independent of water. A number of causal factors have been proposed for the evolution of terrestrialized breeding. While predation has received repeated attention as a potential factor the influence of other factors such as habitat has never been tested using appropriate data or methods. Using a dataset that comprises 180 amphibian species from various East African habitats we tested whether species occurring in different habitats show different patterns of terrestrialization in their breeding strategy. We recovered a significant association between terrestrialized breeding strategies and forest habitats. In general forest seems to act as a facilitator providing a permissive environment for the evolution of terrestrialized breeding strategies. However while terrestrial oviposition is strongly correlated with lowland and montane forest habitat complete terrestrial development is significantly correlated with montane forest only indicating different selective pressures acting at different steps towards complete terrestrial development. © 2013 The Author(s) Published by the Royal Society.