Facilitating effective collaboration to prevent aquatic invasive species spread

Aquatic invasive species (AIS) threaten ecosystem health, serving as a major challenge for conservation efforts worldwide. Invasive species easily move across jurisdictional boundaries that may each have diverse management approaches, leading to management mosaics in which each manager's actions impact those of neighboring jurisdictions. Here, we investigate the potential impact of collaborations between counties in Minnesota in managing four aquatic invasive species (Eurasian watermilfoil, spiny waterflea, starry stonewort, and zebra mussels), with a focus on evaluating the efficiency of county-led prevention programs. We aimed to identify potential collaboration networks, each representing a group of counties with a relatively high number of potentially infested boats moving between them and describe the connections within those groups using social network analysis. We found that collaboration networks formed by ranking reciprocal connections amongst counties yielded efficiency gains over a non-collaborative or county-focused approach but were still less efficient than a state-wide approach. This study presents an analytical framework for identifying collaborations based on AIS dispersal pathways that may increase the efficiency of inter-jurisdictional prevention efforts.