Research Summary: Getting IN the HABIT of proactive invasive plant management
Want to know which priority invasive species might pose a threat in your area? The Invasive Species Habitat Tool (INHABIT) provides high-resolution habitat suitability maps and summaries of invasion risk for 137 invasive plants in the U.S.: https://gis.usgs.gov/inhabit/sandbox.rmd.
Summary
Before we can project range shifts with climate change, it’s important that we understand invasive species' current distributions and potential to spread, given today’s climate. While distribution maps for individual invasive plants exist, they tend to be inconsistent in the sources of occurrence data, modeling processes, spatial resolution, and the degree to which expert opinion is incorporated into the research. To develop more consistent distribution maps tailored to address stakeholder needs, Young et al. (2020) collaborated with managers to create the Invasive Species Habitat Tool (INHABIT). INHABIT provides habitat suitability maps at a fine resolution (90 m) for 137 plant invaders in the U.S. Users can identify environmental drivers of invasive species distributions, toggle for degree of model certainty, and view invasion risk estimated for different management units, such as land managed by the National Parks Service and the Fish & Wildlife Service. Northeast managers can use this information to identify invasion risk to management areas across local, regional, and national contexts.
Take home points
INHABIT is a robust, data-intensive, and stakeholder-driven tool that displays habitat suitability maps for 137 of the worst-of-the-worst U.S. invasive plants: https://gis.usgs.gov/inhabit/sandbox.rmd
INHABIT allows managers to make assessments of invasion risk at national, regional, and local contexts. The tool also provides summaries of invasion risk for management units across the U.S. (Management Area Table tab), as well as the environmental drivers of invasion for each species (Model Details tab).
Management implications
INHABIT provides a high-resolution online tool to identify plants that could invade under current climate conditions. The list of modeled species focuses on some of the best known (and problematic) invasive plants in the U.S.
INHABIT was developed in collaboration with managers, and with stakeholder priorities in mind. Model details are accessible and users can toggle between multiple settings to tailor distribution maps to their needs.
Please provide your feedback on the tool website! Developers are looking for input on improving models, summarizing output, and suggestions for new species to add.
Keywords
Range expansion; Management efficacy; Species Distribution Models; Invasion Risk; Plants