Systematic and persistent bias against invasion science: Framing conservation scientists

Abstract

Pereyra and colleagues (2024 ) accused conservation scientists of bias against nonnative species and asserted that this bias casts doubt on the findings of the entire field of invasion biology. They based this argument on a subjective review of the introduction sections of 300 publications on the ecological effects of nonnative species, which they scored in terms of how they thought these introductions were framed: positive if framed as a conservation opportunity, neutral if framed as an ecological phenomenon, and negative if framed only as a conservation problem. They scored 66% of the articles as negative, 33% as neutral, and 1% as positive. Furthermore, they found no notable differences in the degree of negative framing across taxonomic groups, habitat types, and geographic regions, leading to their assertion of an overall bias pervading all published research on nonnative species.