How to integrate mechanical treatment and biological control to improve field treatment efficiency on invasions

Background/Question/Methods

Projecting invasion treatment outcomes and determining controlling efficiency under various management strategies have important implications in field management. Different to herbicide usage that may cause environmental pollution and non-target effects on native plants, nonchemical (i.e., mechanical) methods, such as mowing and hand weeding, have shown great targeted effectiveness on invasion. However, an interesting and important question that remains unclear is how to reduce the need for repeated applications of mechanical treatments. One possible approach is to integrate mechanical treatments with biological control agents, which can attack and limit invasion spread after being established in the field. We hypothesize that applying mechanical methods to remove occurring invasive plant while establishing biological control agents, then using the established biological control agents to limit future regrowth of invasive plant, will decrease the use of mechanical treatments. To include vegetation dispersal, we developed a spatial modeling framework, using paired logistic equation models of both a resident native plant and an invasive plant, and a biological control agent, to capture the dynamics change of native and invasive plants under different treatment scenarios. Specifically, we examined four factors; the initial application location of biological agents, their controlling efficiency, the treatment frequency (how often nonchemical treatment will be applied), and the coverage size (how big areas mechanical treatment will cover) of mechanical treatment.

Results/Conclusions

We found that explicitly targeted biological control agents showed significantly stronger controlling impacts on invasive plants than did non-targeted agents, whereas a higher treatment frequency could compensate for the drawback of untargeted treatment. Our results also suggested that adding mechanical treatment can further limit invasion spread with the cooperation of established biological control agents, and applying mechanical treatment in a lower frequency, but treating larger areas per time, is a more efficient approach than vice versa. We emphasize that a high biological control efficiency can continuously decrease the requirement of repeated treatment of nonchemical methods and maintain the invasive population at a low level. The model we developed here can be potentially extended and used by field managers on prioritizing controlling efforts to achieve a higher efficiency.