Human perceptions of nature and the environment are increasingly being recognised as important for environmental management and conservation. Understanding people's perceptions is crucial for understanding behaviour and developing effective management strategies to maintain, preserve and improve biodiversity, ecosystem services and human well-being. As an interdisciplinary team, we produced a synthesis of the key factors that influence people's perceptions of invasive alien species, and ordered them in a conceptual framework. In a context of considerable complexity and variation across time and space, we identified six broad-scale dimensions: (1) attributes of the individual perceiving the invasive alien species; (2) characteristics of the invasive alien species itself; (3) effects of the invasion (including negative and positive impacts, i.e. benefits and costs); (4) socio-cultural context; (5) landscape context; and (6) institutional and policy context. A number of underlying and facilitating aspects for each of these six overarching dimensions are also identified and discussed. Synthesising and understanding the main factors that influence people's perceptions is useful to guide future research, to facilitate dialogue and negotiation between actors, and to aid management and policy formulation and governance of invasive alien species. This can help to circumvent and mitigate conflicts, support prioritisation plans, improve stakeholder engagement platforms, and implement control measures.

Centre for Agroecology Water and Resilience Coventry University Coventry United Kingdom

Centre for Functional Ecology Department of Life Sciences University of Coimbra Calçada Martim de Freitas 3000 456 Coimbra Portugal

Centre for Invasion Biology Department of Botany and Zoology Stellenbosch University Matieland 7602 South Africa

Centre of Applied Ecology and Sustainability Departamento de Ecología Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile O'Higgins 340 Santiago Chile

Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development Utrecht University The Netherlands

Department of Environmental Science Rhodes University Grahamstown 6140 South Africa

Department of Environmental Systems Science Institute of Integrative Biology ETH Zurich 8092 Zurich Switzerland

Environment and Sustainability Institute University of Exeter Penryn Campus Penryn Cornwall TR10 9FE United Kingdom

Humanities and Communication Arts Western Sydney University Locked Bag 1797 Penrith NSW 2751 Australia; Department of Historical Studies University of Johannesburg PO Box 523 Auckland Park 2006 South Africa

Institute of Botany Department of Invasion Ecology The Czech Academy of Sciences CZ 252 43 Průhonice Czech Republic

Institute of Geography and Sustainability University of Lausanne 1015 Lausanne Switzerland

Research Network in Biodiversity and Evolutionary Biology Research Centre in Biodiversity and Genetic Resources University of Porto Campus Agrário de Vairão Rua Padre Armando Quintas PT4485 661 Vairão Portugal

School of Environment Resources and Sustainability University of Waterloo Waterloo Ontario N2L3G1 Canada; Centre for Invasion Biology Department of Botany and Zoology Stellenbosch University Matieland 7602 South Africa

School of Environment Resources and Sustainability University of Waterloo Waterloo Ontario N2L3G1 Canada; Institute of Geography and Sustainability University of Lausanne 1015 Lausanne Switzerland; Centre for Invasion Biology Department of Botany and Zoology Stellenbosch University Matieland 7602 South Africa

Social Economic and Geographical Sciences Group James Hutton Institute Aberdeen AB15 8QH Scotland United Kingdom

References provided by Crossref.org

Management Measures and Trends of Biological Invasions in Europe: A Survey-Based Assessment of Local Managers

Considerations for developing and implementing a safe list for alien taxa

Recent advances in availability and synthesis of the economic costs of biological invasions

Unveiling the hidden economic toll of biological invasions in the European Union

Building a synthesis of economic costs of biological invasions in New Zealand

The EICAT+ framework enables classification of positive impacts of alien taxa on native biodiversity

Societal attention toward extinction threats: a comparison between climate change and biological invasions