Brown Treesnakes

Research on Guam has led to development and validation of numerous effective control tools, including the advancement of reptile control to support native species recovery.

USGS scientists and staff associated with the Brown Treesnake Project are co-located at the Guam National Wildlife Refuge at the northern end of Guam in the western Pacific Ocean. Project staff work on developing and testing control tools for invasive brown treesnakes, as well as understanding their impacts on Guam's ecosystems. Project staff also lead the multi-agency Brown Treesnake Rapid...

The Resource for Advanced Modeling room provides a collaborative working environment for up to 20 scientists, supported with networked, wireless computing capability for running and testing various scientific models (e.g., Maxent, Boosted Regression Trees, Logistic Regression, MARS, Random Forest) at a variety of spatial scales, from county to global levels. Models use various predictor layers...

Environmental DNA (eDNA) is organismal DNA that can be found in the environment. Environmental DNA originates from cellular material shed by organisms (via skin, excrement, etc.) into aquatic or terrestrial environments that can be sampled and monitored using new molecular methods. Such methodology is important for the early detection of invasive species as well as the detection of rare and...

The Brown Treesnake is a highly destructive reptile species that has extirpated many native species of birds, bats, and lizards from the U.S. Territory of Guam. For more than two decades branch scientists with the Invasive Reptile Project have developed, validated, and tested the feasibility of Brown Treesnake control and suppression at various spatial scales.