Designing restoration programs based on understanding the drivers of ecological change

What is it about?

There is growing debate within the conservation community and the wider public on how to treat invasive species. Should we combat them? If so, which ones and how? With limited resources for environmental conservation and a proliferation of species invasions and ecological threats more generally, we need rational science-based approaches to set priorities. Moreover, we need to make decisions before we can complete all of the research to fully understand the threats. Here we present an easy-to-understand common-sense approach to make these critical decisions. To illustrate our approach to making ecological restoration decisions, we explore the case of prioritizing the invasive species threat and biological control as a cost-effective way to suppress the most threatening ones among them.

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