﻿Invasive fish species in Romanian freshwater

Ovidiu Drăgan1, Laurentiu Rozylowicz2, Dorel Ureche3, Istvan Falka4, Dan Cogălniceanu1, Laurentiu Rozylowicz5

1 Ovidius University Constanta, Constanta, Romania; 2 University of Bucharest, Bucharest, Romania; 3 Vasile Alecsandri University of Bacau, Bacau, Romania; 4 S.C. Limnades S.R.L., , Romania; 5 University of Bucharest, , Romania

Corresponding author(s): Ovidiu Drăgan (ovidiu.draganbio@gmail.com)Laurentiu Rozylowicz (laurentiu.rozylowicz@g.unibuc.ro)Dorel Ureche (dorelureche@yahoo.com)Istvan Falka (istipisty@gmail.com)Dan Cogălniceanu (dcogalniceanu@univ-ovidius.ro), Laurentiu Rozylowicz

Received {date}; Revised {date}; Accepted {date}; Published {date}

Citation: Combination of authors, year of data paper publication (in parentheses), Title, Journal Name, Volume, Issue number (in parentheses), and doi of the data paper.

Resource Citation

Drăgan O, Rozylowicz L, Ureche D, Falka I, Cogălniceanu D (2024) Invasive fish species in Romanian freshwater. A review of over 100 years of occurrence reports. NeoBiota 94: 15-30. http://dx.doi.org/10.3897/neobiota.94.117313

Abstract

Drăgan O, Rozylowicz L, Ureche D, Falka I, Cogălniceanu D (2024) Invasive fish species in Romanian freshwater. A review of over 100 years of occurrence reports. NeoBiota 94: 15-30. https://doi.org/10.3897/neobiota.94.117313

Keywords: Occurrence, Observation

Project details

Project title: Appropriate management of invasive species in Romania according to EU Regulation 1143/2014 on the prevention and management of the introduction and spread of invasive alien species
Personnel: Laurentiu Rozylowicz
Funding: Regional Development Fund – The Large Infrastructure Operational Programme 2014-2020 (POIM)
Study area descriptions/descriptor: Romania

Data published through GBIF: https://ipt.pensoft.net/resource?r=invasive_fish_species_romania

Taxonomic coverage

General taxonomic coverage description: Fish species (invasive)
Taxonomic ranks
Species: Ameiurus melas, Ameiurus nebulosus, Carassius gibelio, Ctenopharyngodon idella, Hypophthalmichthys molitrix, Hypophthalmichthys nobilis, Lepomis gibbosus, Oncorhynchus mykiss, Perccottus glenii, Pseudorasbora parva, Salvelinus fontinalis

Spatial coverage

General spatial coverage: Romania
Coordinates: 43°38'38.4''N and 48°19'37.2''N Latitude; 20°10'15.6''E and 29°49'1.2''E Longitude 

Formation period: 1910-2022

Methods

Method step description: Distribution data analysis involved the process of standardising and geo-referencing the occurrence reports of invasive alien fish species to enable spatial representation. We plotted the occurrence records using a 10 ⨯ 10 km grid. We overlaid the 11 river management areas according to the Romanian Waters Authority (i.e., Crisuri, Somes-Tisa, Siret, Prut, Dobrogea-Litoral, Ialomita-Buzau, Arges-Vedea, Olt, Jiu, Banat, Mures) onto the grid map of Romania to conduct the analysis at the catchment level. 
Study extent description: Romania
Sampling description: We collected occurrence data from various sources published between 1920 and 2022, namely, scientific and grey literature, social media, public databases, online questionnaires, and our field data, most of which was collected during 2019-2022 in the frame of a national survey project (Ministry of Environment and University of Bucharest 2023).
Data from the literature were extracted from peer-reviewed articles, conference articles, books, grey literature, doctoral theses, and technical reports concerning the occurrence and distribution of alien fish in Romania. We performed a comprehensive search of literature mentioning alien fish in Romania based mostly on informal searches of papers collected over the years and contacts with experts in the field. In addition, we searched Google Scholar and Web of Science All Databases collection, using a combination of keywords: alien fish, allochthonous ﬁsh, invasive fish, dispersal, distribution, new fish, nonnative fish, non-native fish, AND Danube, Danube Delta, Balkans, Bulgaria, Hungary, Moldavia, Romania, Serbia, Ukraine. We used the names of neighbouring countries as keywords because of the presence of shared rivers, such as The Danube River, which is shared with Bulgaria and Serbia. The reference lists of the publications identified this way were further screened for other potentially relevant articles not covered by the search engines used.
Data on alien fish occurrences were also downloaded from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), a validated public online database (https://www.gbif.org/). Additionally, we collected data from social networking platforms such as Facebook, where anglers and other fish-related peers submitted reports regarding these species, and an online survey sent to researchers from different Romanian institutions. 
Occurrence records are structured in a database that contains the following attributes: ID, Species, Source, Year of recording, Latitude, Longitude, Toponym, and Habitat. The occurrence database is limited to invasive alien fish species in Romania since the majority of the remaining alien fish species have very few occurrence records.
Quality control description: Expert opinion was used to assess data quality and its further use in our study.  We only validated Facebook records that had associated photos.

Datasets

Dataset description
Object name: Darwin Core Archive ﻿Invasive fish species in Romanian freshwater
Character encoding: UTF-8
Format name: Darwin Core Archive format
Format version: 1.0
Distribution: https://ipt.pensoft.net/archive.do?r=invasive_fish_species_romania
Publication date of data: 2024-07-17
Language: English
Licences of use: Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) 4.0 License

Metadata language: English
Date of metadata creation: 2024-06-20
Hierarchy level: Dataset

References
Drăgan O, Rozylowicz L, Ureche D, Falka I, Cogălniceanu D (2024) Invasive fish species in Romanian freshwater. A review of over 100 years of occurrence reports. NeoBiota 94: 15-30. https://doi.org/10.3897/neobiota.94.117313 https://doi.org/10.3897/neobiota.94.117313