Introduction to Invaders Partners

This Invaders Resource Kit provides the building materials and general directions to help you tailor an Invaders program that addresses invasive species in your region. These are your tools, so retrofit, reshape, and modify them as works best for you.

To design your program, you will need to follow several steps:

• Establish contacts in your region's scientific and natural resource management community.
• Select the invasive species that your Invaders program will track.
• Develop volunteer training and field materials - you can base these on our examples.
• Recruit and select volunteers.
• Train volunteers.
• Manage data flow.

How to Get Started

As you begin to design your own Invaders program, your first steps will be to establish contacts among scientists and resource management professionals who work with invasive species in your region and to decide which species you will target.

These contacts will be a great asset as they may be able to:

• Help you select species,
• Serve as experts to verify data accuracy,
• Direct you to areas that need surveying or control treatments,
• Create management plans and implement treatments based on data that your volunteers collect and,
• Give you additional contacts such as groups involved in invasive species control efforts.

Begin by meeting with curators and specialists within your own institution. Have them help you generate a preliminary species list and a list of related researchers, land managers, invasive species control groups, etc. that they would recommend you contact. Contact these individuals to introduce your program and ask for their feedback on your species selection (see sample letter).

Selecting Species: Species selection will be based on ecological considerations dictated by your regional focus and the educational goals of your institution. Some selection criteria to consider include species that are:

• Findable (to reinforce volunteer interest and enthusiasm)
• Readily identifiable with training and tools, preferably macro (always confirmed with expert verification)
• Representative of different taxa to make the project broad in scale
• Important (i.e. a species currently being monitored or on its way to your area to support existing research and management)
• Small enough in total number of species to wrap the brain around, yet numerous enough to exemplify regional invasive species issues. More species can be added as the program progresses.

You will now be able to develop data collection protocols based on your species selection. You may find that your partners have already developed these for you and you can take advantage of those existing guidelines. You may also find that you want to start with something simple and progress to more advanced technologies and protocols as your program grows. In the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum’s (ASDM) Invaders of the Sonoran Desert Region program, we started with collecting data using data sheets and single point coordinates and then progressed to using handheld computers and mapping software.

You can find the current ASDM data collection protocols in the volunteer handbook posted on this web site. You will also find other guidelines and resources posted here to help you with each stage of program development. Please feel free to contact us with your own success stories or suggestions. This resource kit is a work in progress open to revision as new Invaders programs sprout up around the country. With input from a diverse array of users, it will continue to meet your varied needs.

Thank you,

Tani Hubbard
Invaders Program Manager
thubbard@desertmuseum.org
520-883-1380 x133

Yajaira Gray
Invaders Program Volunteer Coordinator
ygray@desertmuseum.org
520-883-3018