Optimal emerald ash borer (Agrilus planipennis) control across the United States

Abstract The invasive emerald ash borer (Agrilus planipennis) causes damages to street trees estimated at US$ 900 million in the next 30 years. Although millions of dollars are spent annually to control this species, such approaches are often based on rules-of-thumb. Here, we reveal an optimal management strategy to protect urban trees in North America from A. planipennis. To achieve this, we embedded a pest dispersal model within a mixed integer programming framework. We discovered that optimized strategies consistently outperformed those based on rules-of-thumb, potentially resulting in the protection of an additional one million street trees and savings of $585 million. Critically, the best management strategies always relied on quarantines and biological control (constituting 74-89% and 11-26% of the project budget, respectively), in contrast with current practices, which have abandoned quarantines. Our findings serve to inform future pest control efforts, and can potentially protect many more trees from this invasive species.