Linking metapopulation modelling and Information Theory for area-wide pest management: a simulation study.

In Gilioli et al. (2008), management strategies for threatened species conservation are evaluated by measuring the distance of a vector of presence/absence predicted by a metapopulation model from the vector representing some specified target state, like an extinction state, by the Kullback-Leibler divergence. In Gilioli et al. (2013), it has been show how this method supports the evaluation of short-term strategies for a pest, the Pine processionary moth metapopulation in Aspromonte (Italy). The aim of this work is to explore the potential of the proposed approach in more general situations, in order to extend it to invasive species.