Social media posts, search trends and online marketplaces can reveal where invasive species are spreading, how people react to them and whether banned invasive species are still being sold. However researchers are losing access to this information, just as invasion science is learning to use it. OneSTOP’s new policy brief reveals this issue and gives out six recommendations to EU institutions on how to address it.  

The policy brief argues that most of the platforms researched are unusable. Throughout 2025, the OneSTOP team asked 14 major online platforms for research access to track the 88 invasive species on the EU's official list. Only six provided usable data: Wikipedia, YouTube, Flickr, Facebook/Meta, eBay and Google Trends, and Google Trends only through thousands of slow manual searches. 

Out of them Wikipedia stood out due to its accuracy in predicting invasion windows and the open, stable and quota-based data it uses. Moreover, YouTube showed a great value in mining individual occurrences and having the highest automation potential. The study led to the conclusion that the closing off of invasive species data was done as a governance choice and not due to any technical necessities. 

In addition, the brief considers that online monitoring of IAS can be beneficial to policy, and gives out six recommendations to EU institutions, platforms and funders.

1. Make researcher data access a legal entitlement, with environmental and biosecurity risks explicitly covered by the Digital Services Act.

2. Calibrate privacy protections so they keep the early, low-volume signals that matter most for early warning.

3. Reward platforms that adopt stable, fair-cost governance like Wikipedia's.

4. Invest in shared infrastructure and data-science training.

5. Frame data sharing as a public benefit rather than a compliance cost.

6. Strengthen EU-hosted alternatives, the European Alien Species Information Network (EASIN) and the European Media Monitor, to reduce dependence on commercial platforms. 

Read more in the policy brief: https://zenodo.org/records/22009561