Jacopo Cerri , Sandro Bertolino, Lucilla Carnevali, Alessandro Piazzi, Andrea Monaco, Piero Genovesi

Biological invasions are a major driver of global change and the target of many public policies. However, we still do not know whether they attract the interest of laypeople and motivate them to know more about this topic. We modeled the temporal evolution of on-line searches about general terms regarding invasive alien species in Italy, on Wikipedia and Google.
Wikipedia pages about biological invasions steadily increase their number of views and the GoogleTrends index for queries about invasive species also increased or remained stable, albeit a growing number of searches, between 2010 and 2019. The number of months without searches decreased through time, for both Google and Wikipedia searches. Also, the number of Google searches increased after the first EU regulation 1143/2014 invasive alien species entered in force. All the Wikipedia pages increased their number of views, by a magnitude suggesting that also laypeople contributed to this dynamic.
A portion of the Italian society seems to have become interested about biological invasions, at least since 2010, regularly documenting about them on the Internet. This paves the way for increasing public awareness about this phenomenon, as well as citizen engagement in monitoring and management initiatives. The increase in Google searches after the EU Regulation on invasive alien species could indicate that general interest towards biological invasions is influenced also by large-scale public policies.