The prioritisation of invasive alien plant control projects using a multi-criteria decision model informed by stakeholder input and spatial data

Abstract

Invasions by alien plants are a significant threat to the biodiversity and functioning of ecosystems and the services they provide. The South African Working for Water program was established to address this problem. It needs to formulate objective and transparent priorities for clearing in the face of multiple and sometimes conflicting demands. This study used the analytic hierarchy process (a multi-criteria decision support technique) to develop and rank criteria for prioritising alien plant control operations in the Western Cape, South Africa. Stakeholder workshops were held to identify a goal and criteria and to conduct pair-wise comparisons to weight the criteria with respect to invasive alien plant control. The combination of stakeholder input (to develop decision models) with data-driven model solutions enabled us to include many alternatives (water catchments), that would otherwise not have been feasible. The most important criteria included the capacity to maintain gains made through control operations, the potential to enhance water resources and conserve biodiversity, and threats from priority invasive alien plant species. We selected spatial datasets and used them to generate weights that could be used to objectively compare alternatives with respect to agreed criteria. The analysis showed that there are many high priority catchments which are not receiving any funding and low priority catchments which are receiving substantial allocations. Clearly, there is a need for realigning priorities, including directing sufficient funds to the highest priority catchments to provide effective control. This approach provided a tractable, consensus-based solution that can be used to direct clearing operations.

Prioritizing species, pathways, and sites to achieve conservation targets for biological invasion

“…The invasibility of sites is rarely singled out to be quantified (Catford et al 2011), but in practice, species and site prioritization happen simultaneously (Forsyth et al 2012;Roura-Pascual et al 2009), although spatial heterogeneity is seldom explicitly incorporated into prioritization models (Leung et al 2012). Heat maps have been used with species distribution models, along with information on climate suitability to identify areas most vulnerable to multi-species invasion (Gallardo and Aldridge 2013).…”

Assessing the Potential of Sentinel-2 and Pléiades Data for the Detection of Prosopis and Vachellia spp. in Kenya

“…Globally, they are regarded as noxious invaders having substantial impacts on biodiversity, ecosystem services, as well as on local and regional economies in their native and even more so in their invasive ranges [2]. According to Shackleton et al [2] factors that make many Prosopis species successful invaders are: (a) the production of a large number of seeds that remain viable for decades; (b) rapid growth rates; (c) the ability to coppice after damage [3][4][5]; (d) a root system that taps deep into the groundwater table [6,7]; (e) a high tolerance to climate extremes; (f) a high tolerance to various soil types; and (g) negative allelopathic effects on competing plants [8].…”

Automatic Evaluation for Engineering Pathway Premier Award Winners

“…As for AHP method [22],it can be used in many applications besides our web data mining area, such as in ecosystem [23], emergency management [24], plant control [25], and sustainable groundwater resources [26] and so on so forth. From those research works, it is clear that AHP has been widely applied in many of the data management and decision making areas.Some researchers choose a combination of fuzzy theory and AHP, such as Tao et al [27] , Uzoka et al [28] and Feng et al [29].…”