Prioritizing Invasive Species Management by Optimizing Production of Ecosystem Service Benefits
By Lisa A. Wainger, Dennis M. King, Richard N. Mack, Elizabeth W. Price and Thomas Maslin. ERS project representative: Craig Osteen.
Contractor and Cooperator Report No. (CCR-44) 138 pp,
July 2008
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.
Disclaimer: This study was conducted under Research Agreement No. 43-3AEM-3-80092 with the Economic Research Service. The views expressed are those of the authors and not necessarily those of ERS or USDA.
Keywords: agricultural economics, Invasive species, cheatgrass, federal land, land use, ecosystem, cost benefit, ERS, USDA
In this report ... Chapters are
in Adobe Acrobat PDF format.
Updated date: July 2, 2008
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