Overall Purpose
- Provide weed regulatory and natural resource management
agencies with an updatable database and a web interface
to support proactive weed management strategies
and development of weed identification training programs.
- Determine which alien weeds are spreading most rapidly over a
multi-state region before they cause severe economic losses and
environmental damage requiring perpetual control over large
geographic areas.
Our present system for building awareness of potentially
serious new weeds among vegetation management professionals,
teaching identification of new weeds, regulatory listing, and
developing control strategies for alien weeds is fundamentally
reactive. We typically do not know which new exotics should be
considered for active monitoring and aggressive management until
the extent and severity of the weed requires perpetual control of
that weed over large areas of a state or multi-state region.
Not developing pro-active weed management strategies increases
costs of vegetation management by many orders of magnitude. We do
not react until the degraded acreage is very large.
The INVADERS Database System is not another Geographic Information
System. GIS is the appropriate tactical tool if you need to map
the boundaries of a specific weed infestation and relate that
infestation to topographic or environmental features. However,
GIS requires high end computer hardware, has a steep learning
curve, very high data costs, and usually requires a specialized
support staff. Strategic planning does not require GIS levels of
detail. In fact, excessive details may impede strategic planning.
The INVADERS Database System is a strategic weed management tool.
It is designed to support programmatic decision making. It allow
vegetation program managers to view distribution data showing
weed regional scale spread patterns over long time periods.
INVADERS is very easy to learn, uses historic data with low
spatial resolution (county presence or absence), and is easily accessible via the web at no cost.
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