Conclusion and Further Studies

In conclusion, our project had some expected results. The highest risk of leafy spurge spread was shown to be along rivers and roads which supported our literature findings. We were also able to determine an area of high risk without any current plant sites, which could be a potential area of interest for early prevention.  While our model does have some limitations as mentioned previously, we believe our model has the potential to be resourceful to those interested in preventing the spread of Leafy Spurge.

One interesting finding was the observation of a greater spread up north where there were currently less plant sites compared to areas in the south. To verify the accuracy of our model findings, it would be of interest for future studies to incorporate a higher risk value to areas with a higher plant density. In our study, we normalized the plants based on distance from current leafy spurge locations, but would have liked to have given areas with clusters of plants a higher value. Due to this limitation, we only used current plant distribution data from IAPP and did not include data from other sources such as UBC plant data. Other sources had plants data located within the same areas as the IAPP data but because we could not assign a higher normalized value to areas with higher plant densities, the data was not included in our current model.

Below is information on a regional organization that deals with invasive species in British Columbia.

ISC (Invasive Species Council of British Columbia)

The ISC is a non-profit society committed to reducing invasive species in BC. They educate and work with communities to reduce the spread and impacts of harmful invasive species. They help industry and resource professionals become more skilled with detection. They even have an interesting tool called Report-A-Weed where you can record and identify the location of an invasive plant.