Mapping of the distribution of exotic plant species on the "Akrotiri Peninsula" (Crete, Greece)

Exotic plant invasions hold serious detrimental effects to the environment globally, resulting in huge costs to governments in control and eradication. In order to assess this problem, the collection of spatially accurate data, knowledge of ecological and geographical information sciences is required. Moreover, such assessments are beneficial for the implementation of management plans to control the problem. In aggreement with the goals set out by the E.U. project 'EPIDEMIE', the aim of this study was to collate and analyse a spatially references databases on the distribution of common exotic plant species of the Akrotiri Peninsula, with the rationale to quantify the extent of infestation of the peninsula in order to uncover potential driving forces at local scales. For datasets to be meaningful to the study, it is essential that they should be relevant to background sciences and comply with spatial processes, thus be in optimum scales to yield meaningful results. The integration of species population locations and IKONOS imagery of the Akrotiri Peninsula, Crete, Greece (acquisition date: April 2000) in a GIS made possible the creation of an accurate and rapid land unit database plus the delineation and classification of the peninsula's road network. Further geoprocessing and manipulation allowed the extraction of explanatory variables for statistical analyses by Kruskal-Wallis H Test and multivariate Discriminant Analysis. Analysis resulted in the exposure of an exotic species infestation trend across the road network and a model that uncovered associations between land unit classes and exotic plant population distributions. The outcome of this study, points to the combined use of GIS and multivariare statistic as management tools in understanding underlying driving forces that control exotic plant invansion.