What the dashboards answer
- Is biological control working? Across Utah's SIMP sites visited in two or more years, target weed cover fell at 37 sites and rose at 17.
- Are we releasing agents where the weed is? Of 301 Utah county-and-weed pairs with an available agent, 193 had no release on record.
- Which weeds have no biological tool at all, and where are new detections appearing?
- Twenty-two years of SIMP monitoring data as a trend map, with three trend classes and an AI-drafted narrative a coordinator can edit.
The research side
Rachel Winston is lead editor of Biological Control of Weeds: A World Catalogue of Agents and Their Target Weeds, lead or co-author of more than a dozen USDA Forest Service field guides and manuals, and author of 80+ fact sheets on the weeds targeted for biological control in North America. The dashboard work and the published guides come from the same two people.
Questions we are asked
- What data do we need to start?
- Release records with a location and date, and monitoring visits with a cover or density measure. Spreadsheets are fine; we have migrated worse.
- Do you write the field guides too?
- Yes. See the publications page for the field guides, fact sheets, manuals and videos Rachel has produced for the USDA Forest Service, the University of Idaho and regional programs.
