Philippa Kaur

The management of introduced species, whether kudzu or zebra mussels, is costly and complex. Now, a paper reports a workable, effective solution that harnesses network analyses of ecological phenomena.Invasive species can pose severe economic and environmental problems, costing more than US$1 trillion worldwide since 1970 (ref. 1). Yet managing this human-driven issue is difficult in itself. The regions involved can be vast — entire continents or countries, for instance — while budgets are typically limited. As well, the sites potentially affected and management options can be numerous. Real systems (for example, all the lakes in the United States) can have thousands of locations that could potentially be infested. By contrast, considering just 40 locations means dealing theoretically with over 1 trillion unique combinations (240) where management could be applied (for instance, to reduce the number of invasive species leaving infested areas or entering uninfested ones). Given these constraints, a key problem is how and where to deploy control measures such as invasive-species removal. While sophisticated optimization approaches exist2, which use mathematical rules to exclude most suboptimal combinations and quickly zoom in to which locations should be managed to minimize new invasions, these algorithms are generally unfeasible for very large systems. Now, writing in Nature Sustainability, Ashander et al.3 demonstrate that simpler network metrics revealing linkages between patches can provide solutions that are often comparable to the more complex optimization algorithms. More

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Climate and land cover dataOur study of tropical dry season dynamics required climatic variables with high temporal resolution (i.e., daily) and full coverage of tropic regions. To reduce uncertainties associated with the choice of precipitation (P) and evapotranspiration (Ep or E) datasets, we used an ensemble of eight precipitation products, three reanalysis-based products for Ep, and one satellite-based land E product. These precipitation datasets were derived four gauge-based or satellite observation (CHIRPS58, GPCC59, CPC-U60 and PERSIANN-CDR61), three reanalyses (ERA-562, MERRA-263, and PGF64) and a multi-source weighted ensemble product (MSWEP v2.865). The potential evapotranspiration (Ep) was calculated using the FAO Penman–Monteith equation66 (Eqs. (1, 2)), which requires meteorological inputs of wind speed, net radiation, air temperature, specific humidity, and surface pressure. We derived these meteorological variables from the three reanalysis products (ERA-5, MERRA-2, and GLDAS-2.067). Since PGF reanalysis lacked upward short- and long-wave radiation output and thus net radiation, we used available meteorological outputs from GLDAS-2.0 instead, which was forced entirely with the PGF input data.$${Ep}=frac{0.408cdot triangle cdot left({R}_{n}-Gright)+gamma cdot frac{900}{T+273}cdot {u}_{2}cdot left({e}_{s}-{e}_{a}right)}{triangle +{{{{{rm{gamma }}}}}}cdot left(1+0.34cdot {u}_{2}right)}$$
(1)
$${VPD}={e}_{s}-{e}_{a}=0.6108cdot {e}^{frac{17.27cdot T}{T+237.3}}cdot left(1-frac{{RH}}{100}right)$$
(2)
Where Ep is the potential evapotranspiration (mm day−1). Rn is net radiation at the surface (MJ m−2 day−1), T is mean daily air temperature at 2 m height (°C), ({u}_{2}) is wind speed at 2 m height (m s−1), ((,{e}_{s}-{e}_{a})) is the vapor pressure deficit of the air (kPa), ({RH}) is the relative air humidity near surface (%), ∆ is the slope of the saturation vapor pressure-temperature relationship (kPa °C−1), γ is the psychrometric constant (kPa °C−1), G is the soil heat flux (MJ m−2 day−1, is often ignored for daily time steps G ≈ 0).We derived the daily evapotranspiration data from the Global Land Evaporation Amsterdam Model (GLEAM v3.3a68), which is a set of algorithms dedicated to developing terrestrial evaporation and root-zone soil moisture data. GLEAM fully assimilated the satellite-based soil moisture estimates from ESA CCI, microwave L-band vegetation optical depth (VOD), reanalysis-based temperature and radiation, and multi-source precipitation forcings. The direct assimilation of observed soil moisture allowed us to detect true soil moisture dynamic and its impacts on evapotranspiration. Besides, the incorporation of VOD, which is closely linked to vegetation water content69,70, allowed us to detect the effect of water stress, heat stress, and vegetation phenological constraints on evaporation. Other observation-driven ET products from remote-sensing physical estimation and flux-tower are not included due to their low temporal resolution (i.e., monthly)71 or short duration72,73. ET outputs of reanalysis products are not considered in our analysis, because the assimilation systems lack explicit representation of inter-annual variability of vegetation activities and thus may not fully capture hydrological response to vegetation changes62,63,67.We used land cover maps for the year 2001 from the Moderate-Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS, MCD12C1 C574) based on the IGBP classification scheme to exclude water-dominated and sparely-vegetated pixels (like Sahara, Arabian Peninsula). All climate and land cover datasets mentioned above were remapped to a common 0.25° × 0.25° grid and unified to daily resolution. The main characteristics of the datasets mentioned above are summarized in Supplementary Table 1.Outputs of CMIP6 simulationsTo understand how modeled dry season changes compare with observed changes, we analyzed outputs from the “historical” (1983-2014) runs of 34 coupled models participating in the 6th Coupled Model Inter-comparison Project75 (CMIP6, Supplementary Table 3). We used these models because they offered daily outputs of all climatic variables needed for our analysis, including precipitation, latent heat (convert to E), and multiple meteorological variables for Ep (air temperature, surface specific humidity, wind speed, and net radiation). All outputs were remapped to a common 1.0° × 1.0° grid and unified to daily resolution.Defining dry season length and timingFor each grid cell and each dry season definition (P  More