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Invasive species treatment is a large management cost on many protected areas. I will discuss my work looking at how to predict expected invasion extent (invadedness) across protected areas in Florida, and its utility for estimating future management expenditures. We used several datasets from the Florida Natural Areas Inventory and the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission to show that site level features are related to variation in invadedness. We also find that predictive features can vary across species and also depend on whether you are predicting presence or cover.  However, although site level features could also predict variation in funding for invasive species treatment, there was no relationship between funding and invadedness. These results suggest that conservation planners may be able to use this approach to estimate future treatment need, but existing cost data is insufficient for projecting future expense.

Dr. Gwen Iacona is a conservation scientist who is particularly interested in the costs and benefits of managing protected areas for biodiversity conservation. She recently completed a PhD under Paul Armsworth at the University of Tennessee and has also worked as a field biologist at Florida Natural Areas Inventory and studied the herbaceous species richness in the longleaf pine savanna of the southeastern coastal plain.  She is currently a post-doctoral fellow with Hugh Possingham  in the ARC Centre of Excellence in Environmental Decisions at the University of Queensland.