Workshop: Tackling the emerging crisis of invasion biology

How can ecological theory, experiments, and field studies be combined to achieve major progress?

Theme
Invasion biology is still a young ecological subdiscipline, but it already starts to show signs of age and its  development is losing pace. Until recently, new concepts on invasive species were proposed on a monthly basis, and there was great excitement about finding new patterns and explaining them. More and more data have become available on invasive species which, however, often question existing concepts. For example, the results of small-scale experimental studies are sometimes in conflict with the results of largescale observational field studies, as is the case for the biotic resistance hypothesis. Some researchers also argue that many concepts cannot be tested at all, as for example data on the number of introduced species are typically unreliable. Broad concepts additionally have difficulties to capture differences among individual invasion events. As a consequence, the list of well-supported concepts on invasive species is awfully short. Invasion biology has entered its next stage, a stage that might be termed "crisis".