Abstract
Climate change is causing a redistribution of life on Earth but also creating new habitats that can result in biological invasions. Despite great efforts focused on predicting range expansions of non-native species under climate change, its induced sea-level rise may open new habitats for the landward expansion of marine non-native species into inundated coastal lands, which remains unexplored. Here we show that over two-thirds of inundated coastal land area (approximately 290,000–470,000 km2) will be environmentally suitable for 122 established non-native marine animals by the middle and end of this century, particularly in estuaries of mid-latitude regions. This emphasizes the need to consider sea-level rise when conducting invasion risk predictions under climate change scenarios. The development of effective early-warning systems and proactive management strategies will become critical for detecting and mitigating marine invasions into inundated regions as coastal lands continue to be reclaimed by the ocean across the world.
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Data availability
Marine predictors used in this study can be downloaded from Bio-ORACLE version 3.0 (https://www.bio-oracle.org). Species distribution data were collected from published literature, Global Biodiversity Information Facility (https://www.gbif.org), Ocean Biodiversity Information System (https://www.obis.org), Atlas of Living Australia (https://www.ala.org.au), National Biodiversity Network Atlas (https://nbnatlas.org) and literature review. Occurrence records and habitat suitability predictions are available at South China Sea Ocean Data Center (http://data.scsio.ac.cn/metaData-detail/1990316944266862592) (ref. 129).
Code availability
R scripts and Google Earth Engine scripts used in this study are available at South China Sea Ocean Data Center (http://data.scsio.ac.cn/metaData-detail/1990316944266862592) (ref. 129).
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Acknowledgements
We thank B. K. K. Chan for his kind advice in barnacle taxonomy. We thank the members of the Liu Lab and Lin Lab for their assistance in collecting and verifying the species distribution data.
Funding
This work is supported by the National Science Foundation of China (42425004) to Q.L.; the National Science Foundation of China (32171657), Youth Innovation Promotion Association of Chinese Academy of Sciences (Y201920) and the grant from Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (2023IOZ0104) to X. Liu; the National Key Research and Development Program of China (2023YFC3108800) to Z.Z.; Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) Discovery grant and Canada Research Chair to H.J.M. and the ArCS III project (JPMXD1720251001) funded by Japan’s Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology to J.G.M. S.M. acknowledges support of National Biodiversity Future Center (NBFC), funded by the Italian Ministry of University and Research, P.N.R.R., Missione 4 Componente 2, ‘Dalla ricerca all’impresa’, Investimento 1.4, Project CN00000033. Q.L. acknowledges financial support from the Key Research Program of Frontier Sciences of Chinese Academy of Sciences (ZDBS-LY-DQC004). This work is supported by the National Multidisciplinary Laboratory for Climate Change (RRF-2.3.1-21-2022-00014) project within the framework of Hungary’s National Recovery and Resilience Plan supported by the Recovery and Resilience Facility of the European Union. Á.B.-F. was supported by the János Bolyai Research Scholarship of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. This study was conducted as part of the activities of the World Premier International Research Center Initiative (WPI), funded by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT), Japan.
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X. Liu and Z.Z. conceived the idea and designed the study with constructive suggestions from J.T.C. X. Liu and Q.L. supervised the project. Z.Z., Z.Y., L.J., W.L., Y.X. and Y.D. collected the data with critical suggestions from J.T.C. and J.G.M. Z.Z., G.Y., J.G.M., X. Li, S.M., Á.B.-F., S.A.K., Z.Y. and L.D. performed data analyses, and J.M.K. provided methodological guidance. X. Liu, Z.Z., J.G.M., H.J.M., S.M. and Á.B.-F. led the writing of the first draft; Z.Z., J.G.M., X. Liu, Q.L., J.M.K., S.A.K. and Z.Y. made critical edits to later versions. All authors contributed to writing and approved the final manuscript.
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Zhang, Z., Yan, Z., García Molinos, J. et al. Global sea-level rise will create a new biological invasion front.
Nat Ecol Evol (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-026-03181-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-026-03181-4
Source: Ecology - nature.com
