earticle

영어

The increase in international trade and climate change have facilitated the introduction and establishment of numerous exotic insects in non-native regions globally. A substantial number of these of non-native insects are currently considered as invasive pests, indicating the importance of preventing new introduction of potential invaders, and evaluating their invasiveness in quarantine systems. This study aims to evaluate whether climate suitability can serve as a predictive indicator for potential invasive pests. Geographic information of presence points for 74 non-native insect species, already established or reported in Korea, were obtained from the GBIF database. Climatic suitability was estimated using bioclimatic variables provided by WorldClim. The presence data, excluding Korean records for each species, and randomly generated pseudo-absence data were used to georeferenced the bioclimatic variables to build climatic niche models. The niche models were developed using Classification Tree Analysis (CTA), Boosted Regression Tree (BRT), and Random Forest (RF) algorithms, which were subsequently integrated into an ensemble model for each species. The final models for each species exhibited high predictive performanceNotably, the ten species classified as major invasive pests in Korea exhibited distinctly higher climatic suitability compared to the remaining species. Therefore, estimated climatic suitability may provide valuable insights for evaluating the invasiveness of exotic insects that may become future invasive pests. The climatic suitability for non-native insects in Korea was found to be relatively high in coastal regions and on Jeju Island. These findings suggest the need for concentrated preventive efforts, including surveillance and eradication initiatives, in these regions.