Prioritizing Invasive Species Management in the Carlsbad Hydrologic Unit

The Carlsbad Hydrologic Unit contains diverse habitats that support a large number of rare and threatened plant and animal species. These habitats are at risk from infestations of invasive plant species, which can take over habitats displacing native plants and associated wildlife. San Elijo Lagoon Conservancy (SELC) protects native habitats by performing conservation, habitat restoration, and invasive species mitigation. The Conservancy needed to focus its resources on targeting the invasive species infestations that pose the greatest risk to native habitats and associated wildlife while working with a limited budget. The project created a user-friendly and repeatable tool for SELC to prioritize invasive species infestations for mitigation. SELC is a non-profit organization with limited resources and wanted to focus on the activities that maximize their resources to conserve native habitats. The project was accomplished by developing an ArcGIS tool that ranks known invasive species infestations from low to high priority based on their potential risk to native habitats, probability to spread due to surrounding disturbances and transport mechanisms, and their location accessibility. This tool was developed using Python and ArcGIS. An analysis using the tool ranked 112 out of 12,504 known invasive species infestations ranked as high priority locations for mitigation