Global establishment risk of stored products beetles

Abstract

Stored-product beetles were regarded as some of the most important stored-product pests in the world. Predicting which one in hundreds of potential invasive stored-product beetles is the most likely to invade a region presents a significant challenge. A global presence/absence dataset, including 201 economically significant stored beetles in 143 countries/regions, was analysed using a Self-Organizing Map (SOM) to categorize regions based on similarities in species assemblages. This method is able to rank these stored-product beetles based on risk of establishment indices (values between 0 and 1). From the six countries/regions selected from each continent, we can have an overview of the global invasive risk of this group of beetles. We also found that those countries geographically close were clustered together by the SOM analysis because they have similar beetle assemblages and therefore represent greater threats to each other as sources of invasive stored-product beetles.

Keywords

• stored-product beetles
• coleoptera
• self-organizing map
• establishment risk