Thank you for visiting nature. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer. In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript. Freshwater turtles are often used as terrarium pets, especially juveniles of exotic species. At the adult stage they are often released by their owners into the wild despite their high invasion potential.
In Europe these thermophilic potentially invasive alien species occupy the habitats of the native European pond turtle Emys orbicularis Linnaeus, , with new records from the wild being made specifically in Eastern Europe Latvia and Ukraine during recent decades. Assessing the potential of alien freshwater turtles to establish in new territories is of great concern for preventing invasion risks while preserving native biodiversity in the present context of climate change.
We explored this issue by identifying the present and future by suitable habitats of the European pond turtle and several potentially invasive alien species of freshwater turtle already settled in Europe, using a geographic information system GIS modelling approach based on datasets from CliMond for climate, Near-global environmental information NGEI for freshwater ecosystems EarthEnv and Maxent modelling using open-access databases, data from the literature and original field data.
Modelling was performed for seven species of alien freshwater turtles occurring from the extreme northern to southern borders of the European range of E. In Ukraine, the most Eastern limit of E. Of these alien species, the most potentially successful in terms of range expansion throughout Europe were T.
Correlation between the built SDMs for the native E. Moreover, a Multiple Regression Analysis revealed that by , in most of Europe from the western countries to Ukraine , the territory overlap between E. Importantly, by , Eastern Europe and Ukraine are predicted to be the areas with most suitable habitats for the European pond turtle yet with most limited overlap with the invasive alien species.
