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Prioritising weed management activities in a data deficient environment: the Pilbara islands, Western Australia.

ABSTRACT: Along the Pilbara coast of Western Australia (WA) there are approximately 598 islands with a total area of around 500 km(2). Budget limitations and logistical complexities mean the management of these islands tends to be opportunistic. Until now there has been no review of the establishment and impacts of weeds on Pilbara islands or any attempt to prioritise island weed management. In many instances only weed occurrence has been documented, creating a data deficient environment for management decision making. The purpose of this research was to develop a database of weed occurrences on WA islands and to create a prioritisation process that will generate a ranked list of island-weed combinations using currently available data. Here, we describe a model using the pairwise comparison formulae in the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP), four metrics describing the logistical difficulty of working on each island (island size, ruggedness, travel time, and tenure), and two well established measures of conservation value of an island (maximum representation and effective maximum rarity of eight features). We present the sensitivity of the island-weed rankings to changes in weights applied to each decision criteria using Kendall's tau statistics. We also present the top 20 ranked island-weed combinations for four modelling scenarios. Many conservation prioritisation tools exist. However, many of these tools require extrapolation to fill data gaps and require specific management objectives and dedicated budgets. To our knowledge, this study is one of a few attempts to prioritise conservation actions using data that are currently available in an environment where management may be opportunistic and spasmodic due to budgetary restrictions.

SUBMITTER: Lohr C

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4945735 | biostudies-literature | 2015 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Prioritising weed management activities in a data deficient environment: the Pilbara islands, Western Australia.

Lohr Cheryl C Passeretto Kellie K Lohr Michael M Keighery Greg G

Heliyon 20151217 4

Along the Pilbara coast of Western Australia (WA) there are approximately 598 islands with a total area of around 500 km(2). Budget limitations and logistical complexities mean the management of these islands tends to be opportunistic. Until now there has been no review of the establishment and impacts of weeds on Pilbara islands or any attempt to prioritise island weed management. In many instances only weed occurrence has been documented, creating a data deficient environment for management de ...[more]

PMID: 27441230

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Project description:Phylogeographic studies can be used as a tool to understand the evolutionary history of a landscape, including the major drivers of species distributions and diversity. Extensive research has been conducted on phylogeographic patterns of species found in northern hemisphere landscapes that were affected by glaciations, yet the body of literature for older, unaffected landscapes is still underrepresented. The Pilbara region of north-western Australia is an ancient and vast landscape that is topographically complex, consisting of plateaus, gorges, valleys, and ranges, and experiences extreme meteorological phenomena including seasonal cyclonic activity. These features are expected to influence patterns of genetic structuring throughout the landscape either by promoting or restricting the movement of pollen and seed. Whilst a growing body of literature exists for the fauna endemic to this region, less is known about the forces shaping the evolution of plant taxa. In this study we investigate the phylogeography of two iconic Pilbara tree species, the Hamersley Bloodwood (Corymbia hamersleyana) and Western Gidgee (Acacia pruinocarpa), by assessing patterns of variation and structure in several chloroplast DNA regions and nuclear microsatellite loci developed for each species. Gene flow was found to be extensive in both taxa and there was evidence of long-distance seed dispersal across the region (pollen to seed ratios of 6.67 and 2.96 for C. hamersleyana and A. pruinocarpa, respectively), which may result from flooding and strong wind gusts associated with extreme cyclonic activity. Both species possessed high levels of cpDNA genetic diversity in comparison to those from formerly glaciated landscapes (C. hamersleyana = 14 haplotypes, A. pruinocarpa = 37 haplotypes) and showed evidence of deep lineage diversification occurring from the late Miocene, a time of intensifying aridity in this landscape that appears to be a critical driver of evolution in Pilbara taxa. In contrast to another study, we did not find evidence for topographic features acting as refugia for the widely sampled C. hamersleyana.

Dataset Information

Prioritising weed management activities in a data deficient environment: the Pilbara islands, Western Australia.

Publications

Prioritising weed management activities in a data deficient environment: the Pilbara islands, Western Australia.

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