Robustness of risk maps and pest survey networks to the knowledge gaps about a newinvasive pest

摘要

In pest risk assessment it is frequently necessary to make management decisions regarding emerging pest threats under severe uncertainty. Although risk maps provide useful decision support for invasive alien species, they rarely address uncertaintiesassociated with the underlying risk model or how they may change the risk estimates. Failure to recognize uncertainty leads to risk-ignorant decisions and miscalculation of the costs required to minimize these impacts.We use the information gap (info-gap) concept (Ben-Haim 2006) to evaluate where a pest risk map is "good enough" in the sense that it is robust to uncertainties about a pest's behavior while also providing adequately stable risk estimates. We apply the concept to evaluate a set of geographical locations that constitute a risk map. In this case, each map cell, / is characterized by a unique risk of invasion, P,, and its standard deviation, a(Pj). We then use the results to compare alternative pest surveillance networks and identify the network's design that is most immune to uncertainties about the pest.