Mitigated Disasters
This week’s research summary launches a series of papers related to interactions between invasive species and climate extremes, leading up to our next ‘research to practice paper’ on hurricanes and invasions later this summer.
Written by Bethany Bradley, edited by Berlin Nelson
Summary
Extreme events (disasters) like hurricanes, fires, or floods usually lead to a large-scale response from the federal government to help communities recover. Extreme events could exacerbate invasions (Diez et al. 2012) and extremes are expected to become more frequent and/or intense with climate change. However it is unclear whether federal, state, and local government agencies are equipped to reduce risks from invasive species when responding to extreme events. Falk et al. (2024) report examples of interactions between invasive species and disaster management and provide a set of federal planning resources that can also be adapted by state and municipal agencies to reduce the risk of spreading or exacerbating invasive species during disaster response. One major area of concern involves limiting the movement of materials (e.g., rocks or soil used for re-construction) or debris (e.g., downed trees) that might be contaminated with invasive species. For example, when Asian Longhorned Beetle (ALB) was discovered in Massachusetts in 2008, proactive plans created by the USDA for plant protection and quarantine defined a quarantine zone and set out guidelines for transporting or disposing of affected trees. An ice storm later that year affected the quarantine zone, and pre-existing guidelines were passed along to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to ensure that they followed the guidelines and minimized further spread. Appendices in Falk et al. (2024) provide examples of workflows that incorporate invasive species management protocols and can be adapted by state and local governments to integrate into disaster planning. Proactive planning is critical and opens new opportunities to network and collaborate across state and federal agencies.
Take Home Points
Extreme events (natural disasters) are increasing with climate change.
Human response to disasters could facilitate the spread of invasive species.
Management Implications
Appendix A provides a workflow to identify and plan for invasive species threats associated with emergency management.
Appendix C provides some examples of best management practices for cleaning and inspecting equipment and materials to reduce the risk of spreading invasive species.
Related Papers
This research summary is part of a series on the link between hurricanes and invasive species. For other research summaries on this topic see: Kraemer et al. 2017, Bhattarai and Cronin., 2014, and Colleran and Goodall, 2014. For the Research-to-Practice paper (R2P2) on this topic see: Rock you like a hurricane: The perfect storm for an invasion.
Keywords
Climate extremes