Online e-Learning is increasingly being used to provide environmental training. Prevention measures including biosecurity are essential to reducing the introduction and spread of invasive alien species (IAS) and are central to international and national IAS policy. This paper is the first to evaluate the effectiveness of e-Learning as a tool to increase awareness, risk perception and biosecurity behaviour in relation to IAS among individuals conducting work activities or research (fieldwork) in the field. We surveyed participants (a mixture of students and professionals) before, and 6 months after undertaking an e-Learning course on IAS and biosecurity practices. Awareness of IAS and self-reported biosecurity behaviour increased after e-Learning among students and professionals. Students had a lower awareness of IAS than professionals before training (20% of students vs 60% of professionals), but after training students showed a greater increase in awareness which led to similar levels of awareness post-training (81%). Prior to training, risk perception was also lower amongst students than professionals (33% of students and 59% of professionals were aware of the risk that their activities posed to the accidental spread of IAS). There was no change in risk perception amongst professionals after training, however training led to a doubling of risk perception in students. E-Learning also led to an increase in reported biosecurity behaviour and cleaning practices and there were higher levels of biosecurity cleaning amongst professionals. The higher awareness and better biosecurity amongst professionals is likely to reflect their familiarity with the issues of IAS and day-to-day activities in the field. Our results suggest that e-Learning is an effective tool to raise awareness and encourage behaviour change among field workers and researchers in an attempt to reduce the risk of accidental introduction and spread of IAS.

在线电子学习正越来越多地用于提供环境培训。包括生物安全在内的预防措施对于减少外来入侵物种的引入和传播至关重要，并且是国际和国家IAS政策的核心。本文是第一个评估电子学习作为一种工具的有效性的工具，该工具可以提高在现场进行工作活动或研究（田野调查）的个人与IAS相关的认识，风险感知和生物安全行为。在进行有关IAS和生物安全实践的电子学习课程之前和之后的6个月，我们对参与者（学生和专业人员的混合）进行了调查。在学生和专业人员之间进行电子学习后，对IAS的意识和自我报告的生物安全行为得到了增强。在培训之前，学生对IAS的了解比专业人士要低（20％的学生与60％的专业人员），但是在培训后，学生的IAS意识有了更大的提高，导致培训后的意识水平相近（81％）。在培训之前，学生中的风险感知也低于专业人士（33％的学生和59％的专业人士意识到其活动可能导致IAS意外传播的风险）。培训后，专业人员之间的风险感知没有变化，但是培训导致学生的风险感知增加了一倍。电子学习还导致报告的生物安全行为和清洁习惯的增加，并且专业人员中生物安全清洁水平更高。专业人士的更高认识和更好的生物安全性很可能反映出他们对国际会计准则和该领域日常活动的熟悉程度。我们的结果表明，在线学习是一种有效的工具，可以提高田野工作者和研究人员的认识并鼓励他们改变行为，以减少意外引入和传播IAS的风险。