Prioritizing Invasive Species Management by Optimizing Production of Ecosystem Service Benefits

Overview

This report examined how decisions to invest in invasive species management on public lands could incorporate economic concepts to better gauge the level of social benefits generated and how optimization models could be applied to produce the maximum potential gains in ecosystem services. Findings suggested that management decisions were effectively modeled using GIS-based decision support tools, providing a means to reveal assumptions and allow greater input by the public and scientific community into the decision-making process. The optimization model results suggested that benefits achieved through invasive species treatment might be improved if multiple ecosystem service benefits were considered simultaneously when choosing sites and treatment options rather than choosing options that maximized a particular ecosystem service.

This study was conducted under a cooperative research contract with USDA’s Economic Research Service (ERS) Program of Research on theEconomics of Invasive Species Management (PREISM): contract number 43-3AEM-3-80092 (ERS project representative: Craig Osteen). The viewsexpressed are those of the authors and not necessarily those of ERS or USDA.