Abstract
Effective management strategies are needed to control expansion of invasive alien plant species and attenuate economic and ecological impacts. While previous theoretical studies have assessed optimal control strategies that balance economic costs and ecological benefits, less attention has been paid to the ways in which the spatial characteristics of individual patches may mediate the effectiveness of management strategies. We developed a spatially explicit cellular automaton model for invasive species spread, and compared the effectiveness of seven control strategies. These control strategies used different criteria to prioritize the removal of invasive species patches from the landscape. The different criteria were related to patch size, patch geometry, and patch position within the landscape. Effectiveness of strategies was assessed for both seed dispersing and clonally expanding plant species. We found that, for seed-dispersing species, removal of small patches and removal of patches that are isolated within the landscape comprised relatively effective control strategies. For clonally expanding species, removal of patches based on their degree of isolation and their geometrical properties comprised relatively effective control strategies. Subsequently, we parameterized the model to mimic the observed spatial distribution of the invasive species Antigonon leptopus on St. Eustatius (northern Caribbean). This species expands clonally and also disperses via seeds, and model simulations showed that removal strategies focusing on smaller patches that are more isolated in the landscape would be most effective and could increase the effectiveness of a 10-yr control strategy by 30–90%, as compared to random removal of patches. Our study emphasizes the potential for invasive plant species management to utilize recent advances in remote sensing, which enable mapping of invasive species at the high spatial resolution needed to quantify patch geometries. The presented results highlight how this spatial information can be used in the design of more effective invasive species control strategies.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | e02257 |
| Pages (from-to) | 1-13 |
| Journal | Ecological Applications |
| Volume | 31 |
| Issue number | 3 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - Apr 2021 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:This study was funded by the University Research Priority Program on Global Change and Biodiversity of the University of Zurich and the Dutch Organization for Scientific Research (NWO, grant number 858.14.052). The fieldwork campaign yielding the data used in Fig.?1a was undertaken with the help of J. Bekema, B. Bernik, T. de Scisciolo, J. Ellers, W. Jesse, R. Zilber, and the staff of the St. Eustatius National Parks Foundation, with logistical support from the Caribbean Netherlands Science Institute and with financial support from the Van Eeden Foundation (grant number 201509).
Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 The Authors. Ecological Applications published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of Ecological Society of America
Keywords
- Caribbean
- biological invasions
- control effort
- ecosystem restoration
- invasive species management
- patch geometry
- removal strategy
- spatial modelling