Alien CSI Akrotiri Bioblitz 2019

The Akrotiri Bioblitz in Cyprus was a one-off event held as part of the Alien-CSI COST Action (CA17122). It took place for 24 hours between Wednesday, February 27 and Thursday, February 28, 2019. The aim of this bioblitz was to improve knowledge of the biodiversity of the Akrotiri Peninsula, identify potential risks to the biodiversity caused by invasive species and trial methods that could be used throughout Europe for this purpose. More information about the event can be found on these pages: https://osf.io/csvgz/wiki/home/. All bioblitz records can be found in the iNaturalist project akrotiri-bioblitz-cyprus and in the GBIF dataset (Hadjikyriakou et al. 2019). At the time of writing, 396 species had obtained “research grade” status on iNaturalist and included also captive and cultivated organisms. These species were assigned native/alien status, a level of establishment using the categories described by Groom et al. (2019a) and their occurrence in Akrotiri and Cyprus was determined based on the Flora of Cyprus by Hand et al. (2021), the Cyprus Database of Alien Species (CyDAS) by Martinou et al. (2020), the Amphibians and Reptiles of Cyprus by Baier et al. (2013), Fauna Europaea (https://fauna-eu.org), Sparrow and John (2016), Ridout (1983), Peterson et al. (2019), Guerrini et al. (2007), Englezou et al. (2018), Nahum et al. (2010), Christia et al. (2011), Jørgensen and Sørensen (2008), Can and Arap (2005), Haouas gharsallah et al. (2010), Flint (1997), Bouaziz-Yahiatene et al. (2017), Zogaris et al. (2012), Gözüaçık and Atay (2016), Groom et al. (2019b), Savvides et al. (2015) and Litterski & Mayrhofer (1998). In addition, we compared our bioblitz species checklist with the species present in the occurrence dataset on GBIF preceding the bioblitz (GBIF 2019). An overview of the establishment status of the recorded species during the Akrotiri bioblitz can be found in the csv file and summary table (pdf) included in this upload.