Remove saplings early: Cost effective strategies to contain tree invasions and prevent their impacts

There is an urgent need to design management strategies to reduce invasive species spread and impact, but the large spatial and temporal scales of most biological invasions make them challenging environments in which to conduct field studies. In this context, simulation models can play a key role in informing invasive species management. Woody plants are among the most harmful invaders, yet an evidence base to support different management objectives for these species remains poorly developed. Pines (Pinus) have been intensively studied, in terms of demography, dispersal, spread and impact, which makes them an ideal study system to model invasions. Using a multiyear database of observations of an invasive population, we employed an approximate Bayesian computation to fit an individual-based spatially-explicit model to compare management strategies to reduce the spread, population size and impact of a woody invader, Pinus contorta (pine hereafter), on grasslands in Patagonia. We simulated..., We conducted virtual experiments applying a fully factorial design, whereby we ran five replicates of all the combinations of levels of the variables ‘management delay’, ‘stage targeted’, ‘control location’, and ‘total budget’. We simulated a pine population for 50 years, starting from a 7-year-old plantation (already producing seeds), adjacent to a native grassland. Management actions took place exclusively in the grassland, since the original plantation (southernmost eight cells) was assumed to be grown for commercial purposes. We simulated delayed control actions at 0, 10, 20, 30 or 40 years (from the moment pines started spreading, when the pines from the plantation become reproductive) to assess the consequences of delaying management. These incremental delays were based on real world scenarios where pine invasive populations have been spreading for one to four decades without management. Once control actions started, they were carried out annually. We targeted different life stage..., , # Remove saplings early: Cost effective strategies to contain tree invasions and prevent their impacts

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.wstqjq2x3](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.wstqjq2x3)

## Description of the data and file structure

We simulated a pine population spreading from a commercial plantation for 50 years, coupled with annual control actions which started either as soon as pines began to spread (when pines in the plantation become reproductive; proactive management) or assuming that control actions were delayed at incremental decadal intervals (reactive management). For control interventions, we targeted different life stages, prioritized areas at different locations of the landscape and explored a wide range of available budgets limiting the percentage of the landscape that could be managed every year. We aimed to answer the following set of comprehensive questions of management relevance: 1-a) Which is the minimum budget that achieves containment (i.e. only the area covered...