Now for something completely different! Dr Nigel Hardiman, Lecturer in Conservation and Business at DICE describes why he recently spent three days in a Kent Sport squash court:
Invasive alien species of plants, animals, fungi and microbes are a major threat to global biodiversity, considered second only to habitat destruction. Invasive plants cause billions of dollars of economic loss annually in agriculture and forestry, at the same time altering ecological processes, degrading ecosystem services and disrupting ecological integrity. They can be dispersed in a variety of forms, including as adult individuals or seeds and may be transported both by natural vectors, e.g., wind, rain, flowing water, animals, by humans or a combination of both.
A small but growing body of research suggests that tourism, including recreation, has a high potential for unintended dispersal of invasive plant species, both between and within countries. With more than 1 billion international tourist arrivals recorded worldwide in 2012 and with recreation now the acknowledged primary economic use of Britain’s publicly-owned woodlands, more people are visiting our natural areas, more often, than ever before. Popular, nature-based activities such as walking, horse and mountain bike riding are good for a healthy society and arguably promote awareness of our natural environment. However, they may at the same time be acting unknowingly as vectors for spreading invasive weed species, carried on clothing or equipment.
To investigate this issue, Nigel Hardiman and Ian Bride from the Durrell Institute of Ecology and Conservation within the School of Anthropology and Conservation teamed up with Louis Passfield and Kristina Dietz from the School of Sport and Exercise Sciences. Using a custom-built circular track, 11,180 painstakingly-counted tiny seed beads and some unorthodox squash court time in the Canterbury Sports Centre, they spent three days testing propensity for seed attachment on boot soles and mountain bike tyres under various conditions of soil moisture and distance travelled. As Nigel commented, ‘although we know from several published observational studies that seeds can be picked up and dispersed on cars, clothing, horse dung and animal fur, only three experimental studies have been undertaken worldwide to date on seed attachment on clothing, and none at all on mountain bike tyres, so we hope that our findings will give new insights to land managers and tourists on how to mitigate against the risk of unintentional weed dispersal in our natural areas.’