Nature

New app for tracking invasive alien species

The European Commission just launched a new online app to track invasive animal & plant species in the EU.

The app contains information of plants and animals introduced by accident or deliberately into a natural environment where they would not be normally found and makes it possible to use your phone’s localisation system and camera to capture images of them, so as to ensure that the species can be registered and tracked.

There are currently 37 invasive alien species of Union concern. These include:

1 – The American grey squirrel, which transfers a poxyvirus lethal to native red squirrels and leads to their local extinction.

2 – The raccoon, which can harbour and spread diseases affecting humans, as well as farmed and wild animals.

3 – The signal crayfish, which carries the crayfish plague fungus and may lead native crayfish species to become extinct.

4 – The mile-a-minute weed, which can smother native wetland vegetation.

5 – the yellow-legged hornet, which aggressively preys on native honey bees.

 

This article is a post of the series “At A Glance” which refers directly to the original source.

 

Tags

Mauro Armadi (Rausten)

Founder and Editor-in-chief of “My country? Europe.”.

Related Articles

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Back to top button
Close
Close