"Until now our knowledge of natural and human-assisted dispersal of species has been insufficient to confidently track and predict the spread of non-indigenous marine species," says Professor England.
"Now we have a tool that can include data on currents, geography and the biology of an organism to help separate natural dispersal from that which happens through shipping and trad. It's a pretty sophisticated model and we plan to make it available as a research tool on the World Wide Web."
Discovery: new species of moon jellyfish
The researchers also discovered that there are far more species of moon jellyfish than previously thought.
"We identified 16 species of moon jellyfish, revealing that marine biodiversity is actually much higher than was thought previously," Dr Dawson says, "in retrospect it's easy to see how this wasn't noticed until now.
"When you examine moon jellyfish from locations from around the world they look very similar; it's only when you analyse their DNA as we did, that it becomes obvious that they're very different. This means that traditional methods that compare physical characteristics can benefit from modern techniques such as DNA analysis," he says.