WHIPPET A novel tool for prioritizing invasive plant populations for regional eradication

Large geographic areas can have numerous incipient invasive plant populations that necessitate eradication However resources are often deficient to address every infestation Within the United States weed lists (either state-level or smaller unit) generally guide the prioritization of eradication of each listed species uniformly across the focus region This strategy has several limitations that can compromise overall effectiveness which include spending limited resources on 1) low impact populations 2) difficult to access populations or 3) missing high Impact populations of low priority species Therefore we developed a novel science-based transparent analytical ranking tool to prioritize weed populations Instead of species for eradication and tested it on a group of noxious weeds in California For outreach purposes we named the tool WHIPPET (Weed Heuristics Invasive Population Prioritization for Eradication Tool) Using the Analytic Hierarchy Process that Included expert opinion we developed three major criteria four sub-criteria and four sub-sub-criteria taking into account both species and population characteristics Subject matter experts weighted and scored these criteria to assess the relative impact potential spread and feasibility of eradication (major criteria) for 100 total populations of 19 species Species-wide population scores indicated that conspecific populations do not necessarily group together in the final ranked output Thus priority lists based solely on species-level characteristics are less effective compared to a blended prioritization based on both species attributes and individual population and site parameters WHIPPET should facilitate a more efficacious decision-making process allocating limited resources to target invasive plant infestations with the greatest predicted impacts to the region under consideration (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd All rights reserved