Economics of Weed Management: Principles and Practices

Weed scientists and invasive plant biologists must find cost-effective, ecologically based methods to manage undesirable plants. Economic analyses are needed for management, policy making, and setting research priorities. The fundamental economic principle for weed management is simple: act only if the benefits exceed the costs. Implementation of the principle is difficult, however, with the many and typically uncertain costs and benefits of management. The economic threshold is a well-known but not practical implementation of this fundamental economic principle. However, adoption of the threshold concept has spurred the development of decision models and use of methods of decision analysis. With these tools, scientists have quantified some risks of management and the value of information about the weed population in a field for management decisions or the value of specific information about weed biology for identifying new management strategies. Meaningful analysis for economic weed management is currently limited by lack of understanding of weed population and spatial dynamics and problematic communication between weed scientists and agricultural economists.