Abstract
Efficient management of invasive alien plants requires robust and cost-efficient methods for measuring the abundance and spatial structure of invasive alien plants with sufficient accuracy. Here, we present such a monitoring method using ad hoc presence-absence records that are routinely collected for various management and research needs in Kruger National Park, South Africa. The total and local abundance of all invasive alien plants were estimated using the area-of-occupancy model that depicts a power-law scaling pattern of species occupancy across scales and a detection-rate-based Poisson model that allows us to estimate abundance from the occupancy, respectively. Results from these two models were consistent in predicting a total of about one million invasive alien plant records for the park. The accuracy of log-transformed abundance estimate improved significantly with the increase of sampling effort. However, estimating abundance was shown to be much more difficult than detecting the spatial structure of the invasive alien plants. Since management of invasive species in protected areas is often hampered by limited resources for detailed surveys and monitoring, relatively simple and inexpensive monitoring strategies are important. Such data should also be appropriate for multiple purposes. We therefore recommend the use of the scaling pattern of species distribution as a method for rapid and robust monitoring of invasive alien plants in protected areas. Not only do these approaches provide valuable tools for managers and biologists in protected areas, but this kind of data, which can be collected as part of routine activities for a protected area, provides excellent opportunities for researchers to explore the status of aliens as well as their assemblage patterns and functions.
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Acknowledgments
We are grateful to G. Blanchet, G. Cruz-Piñón, F. He, K. J. Gaston, I. Kühn, W. E. Kunin, S. Hartley and anonymous reviewers for comments and logistic help, and SANParks and the Centre for Invasion Biology, Stellenbosch University, for financial support. C.H., L.C.F and D.M.R. acknowledge financial support from the NRF. We thank the Kruger National Park rangers for collecting the CyberTracker data and Zuzana Sixtová for technical assistance with editing.
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Hui, C., Foxcroft, L.C., Richardson, D.M., MacFadyen, S. (2013). A Cross-Scale Approach for Abundance Estimation of Invasive Alien Plants in a Large Protected Area. In: Foxcroft, L., Pyšek, P., Richardson, D., Genovesi, P. (eds) Plant Invasions in Protected Areas. Invading Nature - Springer Series in Invasion Ecology, vol 7. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-7750-7_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-7750-7_5
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