Habitat restoration and the management of invasive species are important strategies for conserving biodiversity, especially in recently burned areas which are especially vulnerable to invasion. To help managers prioritize restoration locations, Conservation Biology Institute, Santa Barbara Botanic Garden, and United States Forest Service collaborated to create a new, replicable tool and approach for better combining field data with decision science. Because the data needs for this approach are high, especially in scaling it up to all fires, we experimented with tapping into the vast potential of community scientists (i.e. citizen scientists) and compared the resulting data with those collected by professionals. We then converted the research grade point data into population polygons, and combined with region-wide GIS data in a logic model that includes three criteria branches (sub-models): invasive species, erosion risk, and natural species regeneration capacity. For the invasive species branch, we programmed the Weed Heuristics Invasive Population Prioritization for Eradication Tool (WHIPPET) into an extension of the Environmental Evaluation Modeling System (EEMS), along with some additional, optional criteria, then looped it so it analyzes every species in a single model run and combines their results together. We also evaluated the community science contributions compared to professional expert contributions, and evaluated the decision support system with an expert-opinion based field assessment.
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