Managing Invasive Species: An Introduction

Today's topic is incredibly broad. As we've seen already, invasive species include multiple types of flora and fauna and can have positive or negative impacts upon a wide range of ecosystems. Their arrival can both initiate, and be initiated by, environmental change.  As such the range of management techniques is also rather broad.

To try and cover everything would require a thesis and sorry but ain't nobody got time for that. Instead, I'm going to dedicate the next few blog pieces to management in an attempt to give the topic the depth of attention it deserves. Today I'm just going to provide a brief introduction.

Probably best to begin with a definition of the key term for the next few weeks. The Oxford English Dictionary defines management as:

 

Organization, supervision, or direction; the application of skill or care in the manipulation, use, treatment, or control (of a thing or person), or in the conduct of something.

Vague much? There's rather a lot of 'or's in there.

This is matched by management in relation to invasive species. I'd imagine conversations on the topic go something like :

Chairperson: 'Well those >insert invasive species here< are a pain aren't they? What should we do?'
Person 1: 'KILL THEM, KILL THEM ALL'
Person 2; 'Or, we should just introduce some kind of legal framework to prevent their spread'
Person 3: 'Or, we need to just let nature manage itself'
Person 1: 'SHUT IT YOU HIPPY, I'M GETTING MY GUN'
Person 4: 'Or how about we just carefully monitor them and introduce preventions to the spread?'
etc

My mental image of Person 1, he can't wait to get out there and shoot some invasive wabbits

There's often little agreement about what constitutes appropriate management, with some preferring caution and others opting for novelty (Larson et al., 2013) and options ranging from complete eradication to tolerance of 'new' species as an enrichment of local biodiversity (Walther et al., 2009).

So, lots of options to cover and I'm going to start with eradication next time. Let's see if I can manage to do it justice.

Over and out

The Invader Inspector