Science Response 2017/040
Screening of the Pacific Fishery Regulations (PFR) Schedule VIII Species for Risk of Invasiveness
Context
The Pacific Fishery Regulations (PFR) Schedule VIII contains a list of aquatic taxa that are prohibited from live import into British Columbia; however, the list is large, out of date, and taxonomically confounded. For example, in all but one case, genera, rather than species, are listed in the PFR Schedule VIII (Table A1) such that when these genera are expanded to identify species, half (49.7%) have been taxonomically reclassified into other genera since the inception of the list. Further, it is unknown if all species of each genus were intended to be in the PFR Schedule VIII or if they were even included due to potential invasiveness. As there is a desire to ensure consistency between relevant aquatic taxa listed in the PFR Schedule VIII and those listed (or to be listed) in the Federal Aquatic Invasive Species (AIS) Regulations, a risk assessment process is needed to inform potential future amendments to the Federal AIS Regulations. To ensure that the risk results can be compared effectively across all taxa contained in the PFR Schedule VIII, facilitating any future regulatory amendments, species on the list are being assessed using a single screening-level risk assessment tool, the Canadian Marine Invasive Screening Tool (CMIST). CMIST was previously developed and tested on marine invertebrates (DFO 2015; DFO 2016; Drolet et.al. 2016) and provides a mechanism to rank assessed species based on their biological invasion risk and differentiates likelihood of invasion and potential impacts.
Fisheries and Oceans Canada’s (DFO) Ecosystems and Fisheries Management (EFM) sector has requested science advice to: 1) evaluate the suitability of CMIST for use on all aquatic taxa represented in the PFR Schedule VIII, and 2) in the context of the above analysis, evaluate the aquatic taxa listed in the PFR Schedule VIII for risk of invasiveness in British Columbia. The PFR Schedule VIII contains 1160 fish species belonging to 48 genera and 375 invertebrate species belonging to 6 genera. More specifically, the fishes are primarily freshwater species (1048) rather than marine/brackish ones (112) and the invertebrates are marine gastropod molluscs and decapod crustaceans. CMIST was developed and tested on marine invertebrates only; however, the Montreal Rapid Assessment Tool (RAT), a predecessor to CMIST, was determined to be applicable to freshwater fishes in trade (Mandrak et al. 2014). To ensure CMIST would be suitable for all taxa listed in the PFR Schedule VIII, a subset of these species (including taxonomically reclassified ones) was used to evaluate the suitability of CMIST. Further, since the PFR Schedule VIII includes more than 1500 species, the prioritization process used when applying CMIST to the PFR Schedule VIII will be outlined here, including the supporting rationale.
The purpose of this Canadian Science Advice Secretariat (CSAS) Science Response (SR) is to review the results for a subset of species of each aquatic taxon listed in the PFR Schedule VIII that were evaluated using CMIST (i.e., fishes, gastropods and crustaceans), and determine the suitability of using CMIST for these aquatic taxa. The advice arising from this SR will validate CMIST applicability to additional taxa, specifically those listed in the PFR Schedule VIII. The assessment and advice provided may be used to provide guidance for similar assessments for other taxa/lists.
This Science Response Report results from the Science Response Process of February 20-21, 2017 on the Screening of Pacific Fishery Regulations (PFR) Schedule VIII Species for Risk of Invasiveness.
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