Staying one step ahead

Manaaki Whenua’s Senior Researcher Ecosystems and Conservation, Dr Norm Mason, says having decision support tools that allow for the rapid development of management responses to these “sleeper pests” when they emerge is one way to stay ahead of these threats.

However, Norm says one major obstacle to successful invasive species management is social resistance. “Understanding reasons for social resistance and developing engagement strategies to increase public participation in monitoring and controlling these pests is vital.”

“Current tools for assessing the effectiveness of management strategies have limited capacity to incorporate social factors and interventions.”

To address these challenges, Norm collaborated with Dr Geoff Kaine from Manaaki Whenua’s Landscape Policy and Governance team on research to introduce a new approach to documenting and predicting people’s willingness to manage invasive species; and then on designing appropriate public engagement strategies.

The researchers worked closely with AgResearch and received guidance from biosecurity professionals spanning industry bodies, local and central government, consultants and subsequent correspondents. They also ran two workshops.

Their aim was to incorporate social factors and interventions under changing climates to develop new simulation tools capable of modelling sleeper pest management responses.

The research work included surveying several communities to gather data on their involvement in monitoring and managing three different species, Chilean needle grass (Nassella neesiana – a pasture weed), tomato red spider mite (Tetranychus evansi – a horticultural pest), and the Argentine ant (Linepithema humile – a residential and horticultural pest).

They developed a decision-tree approach that integrated survey results, pest ecology, and available technologies to design public engagement strategies that would enhance community participation in monitoring and management.

The project also developed two generalised simulation functions to model pest spread and management responses in the face of changing land use, climates, and social interventions. Both functions divided the management response into detection, management adoption, local eradication, and spread reduction components. The key difference was that one incorporates local population dynamics in estimating dispersal probabilities between locations.

Norm says the study demonstrated that using innovative approaches to documenting community willingness to participate in management programmes could enable the use of simple decision-tree methods to identify appropriate engagement strategies to improve monitoring and control programmes.“  The study also showed it is possible to develop relatively simple and generalisable simulation.tools that integrate climate effects, land use changes, and attitudes towards pest monitoring and control,” says Norm. “These tools can support effective management strategies in the face of changing land use/cover, climate and external invasion pressure (e.g. from changing international trade patterns).”

The research has been presented in a technical report that will be available in due course.