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Mapping plant invadedness in watersheds across the continental United States
Citation:
Davis, A. AND J. Darling. Mapping plant invadedness in watersheds across the continental United States. International Conference on Aquatic Invasive Species, Winnepeg, CANADA, April 10 - 14, 2016.
Impact/Purpose:
For presentation at the International Conference on Aquatic Invasive Species, Winnepeg, Canada, 4/10/2016.
Description:
Exotic aquatic plant invasions trigger a cascade of negative effects, resulting in altered structure and function of freshwater ecosystems, loss of native biodiversity, and reduction of valuable ecosystem services such as recreation and water quality. The problem of biological invasions is well known, and as a result there are multiple web accessible digital repositories that provide geo-referenced species occurrence data to enable the analysis of the spread and impact of invasive species. However, these tools are currently limited to single species distribution maps and do not provide a way to evaluate how “invadedness” (the number of unique exotic species) varies by watershed (or other bounded region), thereby preventing us from identifying the hotspots of aquatic species invasions across the U.S. Furthermore, these repositories utilize different sources, thus a complete snapshot of the current species distribution is often not obtained from relying on a single repository. To address this, we are integrating occurrence and other attribute data for a suite of known aquatic invasive species from all reliable sources into a single geospatial database with a user-friendly interface that can be queried to provide “heat maps” of exotic richness by watershed boundary for the continental United States. We will present this data layer and illustrate how it can be used to evaluate the threat of aquatic plant invasions to native aquatic biodiversity and services derived from freshwater resources, and elucidate the drivers of multiple species invasions to freshwater lakes at the watershed level. We anticipate that future development of this product will allow queries based on introduction date, origin, habitat and primary dispersal mechanism, and will enable dynamic updating of species occurrence records using an API (application programming interface).