Estimating detectability to address alien plant incursions
I’ve contributed a small section to the recently published Detecting and Responding to Alien Plant Incursions. This volume addresses the full continuum of management from pre-border efforts through early detection to selecting management options and overarching governance. It’s a synthesis of the literature that will be of value to researchers. More importantly, it’s framed as guidance to the land managers and policy makers who are responsible for addressing these threats.
The break-out box that Joslin Moore and I were invited to write regards detectability, and how we can go about estimating it experimentally. This process calls on statistics and experimental design, tempered with biosecurity concerns and our desire to accurately simulate real survey conditions. Throughout, we’ve used examples from our hawkweed detection experiments to demonstrate how we’ve made these trade-offs ourselves. We were also able to include a couple of lovely photographs taken by Roger Cousens during our field work.
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Hauser C.E. & Moore J.L. (2016) Estimating detectability using search experiments, in Detecting and Responding to Alien Plant Incursions, eds Wilson, J., Panetta, F.D. & Lindgren, C. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge UK, pp 71-75.
