Table 1.

A glossary of key concepts and terms of the three-pronged framework and model.

Term	Interpretation
Abundance	The numerical performance of a species in a community; often reported as population size or density. It is the most basic dimension of the commonness and rarity of a species.
Community resilience	The capacity of a community to maintain its structure, functioning and feedbacks despite shocks and perturbations. Here, shocks refer particularly to the impacts of biological invasions on the demographic performance of resident species.
Essential biodiversity variables (EBVs)	A set of basic biodiversity indicators that provide information on population viability and ecosystem resilience.
Invasibility	The properties of a community that determine its inherent vulnerability to invasion. In this work, it is the integral of trait regions with positive invasiveness.
Invasiveness	The features of an alien organism, such as its life-history traits, that define its capacity to invade (establish and spread) following introduction through human agency. The level of invasiveness of a species can change over time and can be measured by the invasion growth rate, defined as the rate of intrinsic growth when the number of alien propagules is trivial while the abundances of resident species fluctuate around their equilibria.
Limiting similarity	A concept in theoretical ecology and community ecology that proposes the existence of a maximum level of niche overlap between two given species that will allow continued coexistence.
Opportunity niche	The view that ecological communities with specialised interactions could hamper the effect of radiation and coevolution, resulting in empty niches unexploited from incremental evolution. The presence of such empty niches in communities thus create opportunities for alien species to establish and exploit through ecological fitting (the emergence and formation of biotic interaction without the coevolution of involved species, but through matching of compatible traits, often after rapid trails and learning).
Propagule pressure	A concept that encompasses variation in the quantity, quality, composition, and rate of supply of alien organisms, or their propagules, resulting from the transport conditions and pathways between source and recipient regions.
Species coexistence	Multiple mechanisms mediate species coexistence and invasion performance in a community. For species coexistence through mutual invasibility, fitness equivalence (or reduced fitness difference) is necessary, while for biological invasions fitness advantage is emphasised over fitness equivalence. In the two-species model, fitness difference is measured by the difference of their intrinsic rates of growth, while stabilising force such as niche overlap, or the lack of niche segregation, is measured by comparing interspecific and intraspecific interaction strengths67.