Aquatic Invasive Species Management: Manager Perspectives on the Current Decision-Making Process

Managing aquatic invasive species (AIS) is a wicked problem – messy, overlapping with other environmental and economic issues, and without any ‘correct’ answers. Improving our understanding of the current decision-making environment allows us to identify the strengths and weakness of the current process and to suggest improvements. We conducted thirty-one interviews with managers involved in AIS management around the Mississippi River Basin and concentrated in Minnesota to better understand their on-the-ground perspectives of AIS decision-making as well as the priorities and concerns influencing those decisions. These interviews also explored the strengths and weaknesses of the existing decision-making process and the ways in which a decision support tool could be of use. We found that managers viewed AIS management as encompassing a wide range of priorities that need to be balanced with one another (e.g. prevention and containment efforts, research into new control tools, control and eradication efforts) as limited resources prevent managers from addressing them all. The strengths of the existing process include the coordination between agencies and the communication with the broader public. This process, however, currently lacks several principles of robust decision-making (e.g. sufficient scientific basis, structure, documentation, an adaptive element). Our results indicate that AIS decisions could be strengthened by explicitly incorporating these principles into the decision-making process and that use of a decision support tool would be an effective way of carrying out that incorporation.