New research on invasion/ re-invasion risks

Date: 22nd December 2021

The Vive la Resistance programme, led by Scion, has recently received funding from MBIE for a five-year research grant. This programme will focus on understanding and preventing re-invasion of wilding conifers and building on the research of the Winning Against Wildings research programme. The outcomes of the Vive la Resistance programme will transform current wilding management practices by breaking an otherwise inevitable cycle of control / re-invasion / maintenance control.

In operational control areas, even where control of wilding conifers is effective, there is a high likelihood of re-invasion of wildings either from a surrounding seed source or from wilding seeds in the seed bank. Therefore, our wildings management programme is at risk of having to commit to long-term maintenance control to continually clear re-invaded areas. By using the National Wilding Conifer Control Programme as a large-scale operational field experiment, coupled with controlled experiments and modelling, this research will quantify the risk of conifer re-invasion and identify optimal strategies to prevent it.

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Posted in: Research