Project Overview

Reports

Commodities

Target Pests

Practices

Despite the urgent need for field tested weed management approaches that confer resilience to degraded natural and working landscapes across the southwestern US, a comprehensive source of prescriptive techniques and supporting research for decision makers is effectively absent from our management toolkit. Here, we propose to meet that need by expanding an existing and widely-used web based tool to include invasive species management support for decision makers in both Arizona and Utah. We will use this funding to engage students at both the University of Arizona and Utah State University to gather information relevant to invasive species management for both states and compile them together on the EcoRestore portal. We will expand EcoRestore into two separate online portals, one targeted to Arizona stakeholders and one targeted to Utah stakeholders. By providing comprehensive and regionally-specific weed management information, decision makers will be able to easily access the best available science relevant to managing their natural and working lands. In addition to helping managers identify the most relevant and up-to-date sources of information for managing nonnatives, the EcoRestore portals will allow stakeholders to cultivate networks (and share information) across the southwest. Invasive species management is a pressing concern across the southwest, the work presented here will provide outreach tools to meet that need in Arizona and Utah, and eventually the larger Southwest region.

Objective 1: Create new content for EcoRestore Arizona focused on IPM. All relevant information related to managing weeds in the state of Arizona (peer reviewed literature, reports, fact sheets, infographics, workshop presentations, webinars etc.) will be leveraged to create a single source of best recommendations. A new menu option for weed control will be clearly noted on the homepage.

Objective 2: Initiate the development of EcoRestore Utah, focusing on the IPM section. Information will be organized by invasive plant type to facilitate search optimization and ensure adequate coverage of all major bioregions and agricultural foci within our framework. Each file will be tagged with searchable keywords, chosen from standard, cross-walked controlled vocabularies (e.g., FAO’s AGROVOC) widely used in weed management libraries. At the conclusion of this Western IPM grant, we expect to complete EcoRestore Utah within two years by creating restoration content funded by a grant from the Society for Ecological Restoration.