Providing Confidence in Regional Maps in Predicting Where Nonnative Species are Invading the Forested Landscape

Nonnative invasive plant species introduced to the South during the past century threaten to forest resources. Knowing their extent is important for strategic management and planning. We used U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) field observations at ground-sampled locations to model the geographic occurrence probability of forest land in the sampled region, and selected nonnative invasive species in ground-sampled forest land locations. We chose kriging to interpolate and map features geostatistically, and to portray quantitative confidence in the estimates across the sampled region.