In the wind: Invasive species travel along predictable atmospheric pathways.

Invasive species such as insects, pathogens, and weeds reaching new environments by traveling with the wind, represent unquantified and difficult-to-manage biosecurity threats to human, animal, and plant health in managed and natural ecosystems. Despite the importance of these invasion events, their complexity is reflected by the lack of tools to predict them. Here, we provide the first known evidence showing that the long-distance aerial dispersal of invasive insects and wildfire smoke, a potential carrier of invasive species, is driven by atmospheric pathways known as Lagrangian coherent structures (LCS).