Dispersal and the design of effective management strategies for plant invasions: matching scales for success

Abstract

Dispersal of propagules makes invasions a fundamentally spatial phenomenon, and to be effective, management actions to control or eradicate invasive species must take this spatial structure into account. While there is a vibrant literature linking detailed dispersal measurements to the rate of invasive spread, and a separate literature focused on incorporating management into invasive models in order to improve the control of weeds, there are relatively fewer manuscripts incorporating state-of-the-art dispersal modeling and management modeling together to provide on-ground recommendations for structuring effective management. In this paper, we perform a generalized analysis of a spatially explicit, individual-based simulation model of invasion management with empirically determined dispersal processes, illustrated with the example of Miconia calvescens in the Australian Wet Tropics rain forest, to explore how matching the spatial scale of management to the spatial scale of the dispersal processes underpinning invasion influences the success of management. We find that management strategies designed to maximize the number of weeds removed from the management region, either in the first year of management or over longer periods, provide a poor estimate of the spatial scale of management that maximizes the probability of eradication. We show that achieving a goal of certainty of eradication requires exceeding a minimal spatial scale of management and total management resourcing. We generalize these results to examine how the spatial scale of dispersal drives the spatial scale of effective management strategies. These results show that to be effective, management of dispersal-driven invasions must occur at spatial scales determined by the scale of dispersal processes, and resourced accordingly. It illustrates how those scales might be calculated for a specific case for which detailed dispersal data are available and generalizes the result to highlight how dispersal scale drives the scale of effective management. The results highlight the importance of understanding the ecological drivers of invasion to structure effective management.