BRENT: A new study found that every day, hundreds of invasive plants roam the world, thanks to web commerce platforms such as eBay. Researchers found that online auctions could mess up the world’s ecosystem and worsen the haywire brought about by biological attacks.
Biological invasions pose significant problems to nature conservation, particularly because species are still being transferred all around the world in an increasingly swift manner.
Horticulture or the practice of garden cultivation is one of the ways that can bring non-native species and cause plant invasions.
Web commerce or trading via the Internet is among the significant drivers that led to the drastic structural changes and global widespread of the horticultural sector. With this, a group of scientists from the ETH Zurich headed by Christoph Kueffer, a senior lecturer at the Institute of Integrative Biology, surveyed web commerce trade being employed via auction or sales websites.
The researchers devised a customized software program and through an automated search algorithm, they monitored the online trade of plants in 10 auction sites including eBay, every day for 50 days.
Throughout the course of the survey, the researchers took note of the types of plants being sold online, the countries where sellers come from and the frequency of sales. They also reviewed the invasive plants included in the lists devised by different groups such as the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) to identify whether the plants being sold are considered invasive somewhere across the globe.
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