Print PageA common strategy for biodiversity conservation is to designate a tract of land as a preserve. However, invasive plant infestation is one threat to biodiversity that can occur regardless of land use designation. Understanding the site level drivers that influence invasibility can help guide decision making in conservation planning by allowing for the consideration of future management costs for a site. We examined the site level factors that relate to invasion intensity at a site by analyzing how the distribution of 30 different invasive plant species on more than 350 conservation lands in Florida was affected by site attributes such as parcel size, site elevation, frost days per year, and nearby human habitation density.
Results/Conclusions
Preliminary results suggest that the invadedness of a site decreases as site acreage increases, or as site elevation increases. In addition, site invadedness increases with an increase in surrounding human habitation density. Finally, invasion intensity is greatest in areas with less than 3 days of frost per year. These results have implications for biodiversity conservation because reserve selection processes rarely consider the invasibility of a site. All other factors being equal, costs of conservation can be minimized by avoiding sites that are more likely to harbor invasion.
