Management of invasive alien species in Spain: a bibliometric review

Scientific and grey literature on invasive alien species (IAS) is conditioned by social, economic and political priorities, editorial preferences and species and ecosystem characteristics. This leads to knowledge gaps and mismatches between scientific research interests and management needs. We reviewed the literature on IAS management in Spain found in Scopus, Web of Science, Google Scholar and Dialnet to identify key deficiencies and priority research areas. The collected literature was classified, employing features describing formal aspects and content. We used bibliometric and keyword co-occurrence network analyses to assess the relationship between features and reveal the existence of additional topics. Most of the compiled documents (n = 388) were focused on terrestrial ecosystems and inland waters, whereas marine and urban ecosystems were under-represented. The literature was largely generic and not species-specific, focusing on raising awareness and proposing changes on current regulation as prominent approaches to prevent further introductions. The compiled authors exhibited many clear publishing preferences (e.g. language or document type), but less regarding target taxa. In addition, there was a strong association between species and the different features considered, especially between the methodological approach (e.g. review, field experiment) and the primary emphasis of study (i.e. basic/theoretical, applied or interdisciplinary). This indicates that research on IAS has had a strong species-specific focus. References about terrestrial species focused mainly on vascular plants, whereas references about inland waters were mostly on fishes and the giant reed (Arundo donax), which has been managed with partial success. Animal culling and plant removal were the most frequent eradication and small-scale control treatments, whereas the documents addressing wider spatial scales were largely theoretical. Consequently, the success of described treatments was largely uncertain. Spanish invasion science research has been occasionally innovative, incorporating novel technologies (e.g. species distribution modelling) and engaging society with citizen-science approaches. However, the ratio between basic/theoretical and applied studies indicates that more applied research/management is needed, especially in inland waters and marine ecosystems. We call for increasing effort in the effective dissemination of experience in IAS management to enhance current practical knowledge, including that of schemes undertaken by public agencies.Agencia Estatal de Investigación PID2019-103936GB-C21Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación RED2018‐102571‐T, PID2020- 118550RB, FJCI2016-30829Generalitat de Catalunya 2017 SGR 548Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional RTI2018-093504-B-I0

Management of invasive alien species in Spain: A bibliometric review

Este artículo contiene 28 páginas, 7 figuras, 2 tablas.Scientific and grey literature on invasive alien species (IAS) is conditioned by social, economic and political priorities, editorial preferences and species and ecosystem characteristics. This leads to knowledge gaps and mismatches between scientific research interests and management needs. We reviewed the literature on IAS management in Spain found in Scopus, Web of Science, Google Scholar and Dialnet to identify key deficiencies and priority research areas. The collected literature was classified, employing features describing formal aspects and content. We used bibliometric and keyword co-occurrence network analyses to assess the relationship between features and reveal the existence of additional topics. Most of the compiled documents (n = 388) were focused on terrestrial ecosystems and inland waters, whereas marine and urban ecosystems were under-represented. The literature was largely generic and not species-specific, focusing on raising awareness and proposing changes on current regulation as prominent approaches to prevent further introductions. The compiled authors exhibited many clear publishing preferences (e.g. language or document type), but less regarding target taxa. In addition, there was a strong association between species and the different features considered, especially between the methodological approach (e.g. review, field experiment) and the primary emphasis of study (i.e. basic/theoretical, applied or interdisciplinary). This indicates that research on IAS has had a strong species-specific focus. References about terrestrial species focused mainly on vascular plants, whereas references about inland waters were mostly on fishes and the giant reed (Arundo donax), which has been managed with partial success. Animal culling and plant removal were the most frequent eradication and small-scale control treatments, whereas the documents addressing wider spatial scales were largely theoretical. Consequently, the success of described treatments was largely uncertain. Spanish invasion science research has been occasionally innovative, incorporating novel technologies (e.g. species distribution modelling) and engaging society with citizenscience approaches. However, the ratio between basic/theoretical and applied studies indicates that more applied research/management is needed, especially in inland waters and marine ecosystems. We call for increasing effort in the effective dissemination of experience in IAS management to enhance current practical knowledge, including that of schemes undertaken by public agencies.This research was funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (InvaNET network, RED2018‐102571‐T). Additional financial support was provided by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, Spanish State Research Agency (AEI) and European Regional Development Fund (FEDER, UE) (grants PID2020- 118550RB, PID2019-103936GB-C21, RTI2018-093504-B-I00) and the Government of Catalonia (ref. 2017 SGR 548). RMM benefitted from a postdoctoral Juan de la Cierva Fellowship from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (FJCI2016-30829).Peer reviewe

Visual exploration of semantic-web-based knowledge structures

Humans have a curious nature and seek a better understanding of the world. Data, in- formation, and knowledge became assets of our modern society through the information technology revolution in the form of the internet. However, with the growing size of accumulated data, new challenges emerge, such as searching and navigating in these large collections of data, information, and knowledge. The current developments in academic and industrial contexts target the corresponding challenges using Semantic Web techno- logies. The Semantic Web is an extension of the Web and provides machine-readable representations of knowledge for various domains. These machine-readable representations allow intelligent machine agents to understand the meaning of the data and information; and enable additional inference of new knowledge. Generally, the Semantic Web is designed for information exchange and its processing and does not focus on presenting such semantically enriched data to humans. Visualizations support exploration, navigation, and understanding of data by exploiting humans’ ability to comprehend complex data through visual representations. In the context of Semantic- Web-Based knowledge structures, various visualization methods and tools are available, and new ones are being developed every year. However, suitable visualizations are highly dependent on individual use cases and targeted user groups. In this thesis, we investigate visual exploration techniques for Semantic-Web-Based knowledge structures by addressing the following challenges: i) how to engage various user groups in modeling such semantic representations; ii) how to facilitate understanding using customizable visual representations; and iii) how to ease the creation of visualizations for various data sources and different use cases. The achieved results indicate that visual modeling techniques facilitate the engagement of various user groups in ontology modeling. Customizable visualizations enable users to adjust visualizations to the current needs and provide different views on the data. Additionally, customizable visualization pipelines enable rapid visualization generation for various use cases, data sources, and user group