Reporting costs for invasive vertebrate eradications

Abstract

The eradication of invasive species from islands is a conservation intervention proven to protect biodiversity, with more than 1200 successful vertebrate eradications implemented globally. The demand for eradication projects is increasing and practitioners are planning projects on increasingly larger, more remote and more technically challenging islands. Undertaking strategic planning for conservation requires information on both the cost and benefit of proposed actions, to determine the trade-off in selecting one project over another. To date the cost of eradication projects is disparately reported in the literature, an artefact of different reporting requirements based on where the eradication was undertaken, the scale of the project, the implementing agency and its accountabilities, and inconsistency in reporting all project component costs. Eradication projects have characteristics that allow more refined cost forecasting relative to other conservation initiatives, including a narrow set of major eradication techniques being used, a defined beginning and end point, and distinct project components. Here we present the major cost centres for eradication projects, including a dataset for a suite of rodent, ungulate and predator eradications, using a dataset of 46 eradications primarily from New Zealand, Ecuador and the USA. We found cost increased with island size for all eradication types except ground based rodent eradications. Using these standards to report project costs will improve the ability to evaluate and predict the cost of removing invasive animals from islands to protect native insular biodiversity.