Invasive Species Theory Relating to GMOs (and vice-versa)

Background.

As genetically modified organisms (GMOs) become increasingly widespread features of the agricultural landscape, and development of a new generation of non-agricultural GMOs nears commercialization, there is growing concern regarding whether GMOs pose an ecological risk. From the perspective of an ecological risk assessor, one might liken GMOs to an exotic species. Indeed, this has been done as an intellectual and regulatory framework for thinking about these new organisms. As scientists have tried to develop and validate models to predict gene flow from a GMO to wild relatives in the environment, they have encountered many of the same challenges that are raised when trying to predict whether a species will be invasive.

Intent.

The aforementioned observation grew into a question: to what extent has the scientific literature addressed the overlap between invasive/exotic species and genetically modified species? After a lot of searching and legwork, it appears that very little effort has been made to explicitly link these two fields of research. Those examples that are explicit seem to be a bit dated, perhaps because talking about GMOs like exotics was more necessary in the days before there was a robust community of scientists specializing on the invasiveness of GMOs who have now largely shook off the language of exotic species. However, I think that there are several ways that these fields can contribute to and (re-)enter into a dialogue with one another. This webpage aims to be a first attempt to identify some of these broad areas of overlap and a sampling of how this dialogue might look.

Caveat: by no means have I presented an exhaustive list of resources here. I have aimed for breadth rather than depth by selecting just a few papers to annotate, and tried to make these papers talk to each other to the extent that they can. Hopefully the interested interdisciplinary scientist will use these bibliographies as a jumping-off point for their specialization.

Bibliographies.

I have grouped the literature into several categories (below). Following these links will take you to an internal page with an annotated bibliography of relevant literature. If you are looking for a compendium of all the literature used on this page, please follow the References/ Acknowledgements link, which has a complete listing (alphabetical, unannotated).

How are GMOs and Invasive Species Related?

GMOs and Invasive/exotic species painted with one regulatory brush

Using invasive species models to predict spread of GMOs

Using genetically modified organisms to control exotic or invasive species

All References and Acknowledgements

Direct comments to page author Kelly M Paulson at paul0498@umn.edu

Page last updated 15 December 2003

This page completed in partial fulfillment of the requirements for FW8200 Exotic Plants and Animals http://fwcb.cfans.umn.edu/courses/nresexotics3002/

The views and opinions expressed in this page are strictly those of the page author. The contents of this page have not been reviewed or approved by the University of Minnesota.