Climate change increases the risk of invasion by the Yellow-legged hornet

The Yellow-legged hornet Vespa velutina nigrithorax has established viable populations in France since an unintentional introduction before 2004, and the potential invasion risk of this bee-hawking hornet was estimated by modelling the species climatic suitability worldwide. By further projecting such models under 2100 future climate scenarios, we here estimated the predicted trends in invasion risk related to climate change. We performed eight different modelling techniques within an ensemble forecast framework using presence data from the native and the invaded ranges. We predicted an increase in the climatic suitability for the species in the Northern hemisphere, especially close to the already invaded range in Europe, in Spain and in Central and Eastern Europe - from Switzerland to Hungary up to Southern Sweden. Climate change should also increase the invasion risk in the United States except along the Eastern coast. Scenarios for future climates include predictions from five global circulation models and three special reports on emission scenarios. Standard deviations of the results obtained from the 13 different climate scenarios confirmed the low uncertainty of models to predict an increase in invasion risk across Central and Eastern Europe, close to the already invaded European range. These regions hold among the highest densities of bee-hives in Europe, and could suffer from the potential predation of the putative invading hornet on pollinators. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.