Invasive forest pest surveillance: survey development and reliability

摘要

Worldwide, a large number of potential pest species are introduced to locations outside their native ranges; under the best possible prevention scheme, some are likely to establish one or more localized populations. A comprehensive early detection and rapid-response protocol calls for surveillance to determine if a pest has invaded additional locations outside its original area of introduction. In this manuscript, we adapt and spatially extend a two-stage sampling technique to determine the required sample size to substantiate freedom from an invasive pest with a known level of certainty. The technique, derived from methods for sampling livestock herds for disease presence, accounts for the fact that pest activity may be low at a coarse spatial scale (i.e., among forested landscapes) but high at a fine scale (i.e., within a given forested landscape). We illustrate the utility of the approach by generating a national-scale survey based on a risk map for a hypothetical forest pest species threatening the United States. These techniques provide a repeatable, cost-effective, practical framework for developing broad-scale surveys to substantiate freedom from non-native invasive forest pests with known statistical power.