Progress on DAISIE: alien species inventories in Europe updated

In Europe, a unique alien species inventory with almost 11.000 alien species was established in 2009 through the EU funded Delivering Alien Invasive Species Inventories for Europe (DAISIE) project (http://www.europe-aliens.org). Several high impact publications as well as ground-breaking handbook (DAISIE 2009) documented alarming trends of increasing numbers of newly introduced and naturalized/established species across all groups of organisms. These data enabled to analyse various aspects of invasions at large continental scale, , including their socio-economic aspects, habitat-specific invasion patterns for different taxa, or increasing loss of European taxonomic and phylogenetic uniqueness due to invasions of alien and extinctions of native species. The strength of the European inventory is its completeness in terms of a wide range of organisms covered; however, for obvious reasons such information requires regular updates to reflect the dynamic nature of biological invasions, otherwise it will soon be outdated. Within last year several updates of the DAISIE database have been made to keep it up-to-date. These have included additional species lists from some understudied regions of Europe where regional lists of aliens started to be developed during the DAISIE project, and new records from other regions. The paper will review most recent patterns of alien species in Europe and will report about the most recent development of the DAISIE database and web portal, including the expert registry. The role of DAISIE in international integration of invasive species information will be discussed.