Prioritizing plant eradication targets by re-framing the project prioritization protocol (PPP) for use in biosecurity applications

Abstract

The eradication of newly detected alien plant species is often prescribed, but rarely successful. Eradication programs fail for many reasons, however, for eradication to remain a cost-efficient management option it is clear that good decisions must be made at the outset. Here we re-frame the project prioritization protocol (PPP), a tool widely used in conservation biology, for use with the metrics typically used by a biosecurity agency. We then use existing methods to estimate the cost-efficiency of eradicating 50 hypothetical species incursions and compare the reduction in weed risk achieved by allocating resources using the PPP framework with the allocation based on risk ranking. By alloca..