ABSTRACT
Rangeland and forest productivity, and species diversity, are impacted by invasive species. The lack of intensive cropping or rotational regimes to break pest cycles contributes to the persistence and spread of invasive species across landscapes. EfŽcient deployment of resources to achieve landscape level management objectives is difŽcult without some idea of the location and rate of spread. The objective of this chapter is to illustrate that spatial data collection at one site can be used to aid in the prediction of plant movement at another through the integration of plant productivity models and spatial network models. In this context, the plant productivity model provides the likelihood of an invasive species occurrence while the spatial model re¬ects the environmental conditions and competitive barriers that determine plant movement. Modeling plant movement across actual landscapes is demonstrated using a yellow starthistle (Centaurea solstitialis L.) plant movement project with computations, and processing of the spatial data is carried out using the IDRISI software package from Clark Labs.
