Questionnaire improvements in second-generation, multilingual decision support tools for invasion risk screening of non-native taxa

As a result of the increasing threats posed by non-native species invasions, there has been a rise in the demand for decision support tools that can more efficiently identify those non-native species likely to become invasive. As part of the risk screening (first) step in the environmental risk analysis process, three multilingual decision support tools are currently available for the screening of aquatic and terrestrial organisms: the Aquatic Species Invasiveness Screening Kit (AS-ISK), the Terrestrial Animal Species Invasiveness Screening Kit (TAS-ISK) and the Terrestrial Plant Species Invasiveness Screening Kit (TPS-ISK). Here, we describe the recent improvements to the questionnaire that forms the base of these secondgeneration Weed Risk Assessment-type tools. We subjected the AS-ISK and TASISK questionnaires to a thorough revision and extended these improvements for the development of the TPS-ISK. Overall, this involved an improvement of the AS-ISK and TAS-ISK questionnaires, an alignment of the questionnaires across the three toolkits, and the translation of the three resulting questionnaires in all 30 nonEnglish languages supported by the toolkits. Given the most extensive usage of the AS-ISK and, in perspective, of the recently released TAS-ISK and TPS-ISK, it is timely to provide researchers and decision-makers in the field of invasion biology with a suite of updated toolkits designed to streamline and improve the risk screening process. These enhancements will be crucial for the delivery of reports to stakeholders and decision-makers also in the languages supported by the toolkits as applicable, and in line with the ecology-of-language paradigm at the base of the toolkits’ multilingual interface development.