ABSTRACT
Nonnative invasive species (NNIS) present a severe human dilemma due to their collective threat of replacing and damaging human sustaining ecosystems (U.S. Congress Office of Technology Assessment 1993; Mack et al. 2000; Pimentel 2002). Rapid developments in global trade have caught governments and their regulatory agencies unaware and ill prepared to prevent entries of foreign invasive species across previously insurmountable barriers of oceans, mountains, and desserts (Pierre 1996; Simberloff 1996). New introductions of NNIS have accelerated among and across all continents and have been characterized as bioinvasions of bioterrorists that threaten many countries’ biosecurity (Vitousek et al. 1996; Pimentel 2002; Meyerson and Reaser 2003). Of the 20,000 nonnative plant species now free living in the United States, about 4,500 have invasive tendencies, while thousands more reside in our gardens, increasingly in the expanding urban fringe, with unknown consequences to adjoining lands (U.S. Congress Office of Technology Assessment 1993; Pimentel 2002). Deficiencies in policy, deficiencies in consistent research and management funding, and persistent gaps in scientific knowledge have all been
identified as root causes of our current invasive dilemma in the United States (Simberloff et al. 2005). We would add that the lack of social organization to counter these invasions is just as obviously a major shortcoming.
