Business Data

Business data sets relevant to the topic of human-mediated pathways fall into two general categories: those that describe general geographic patterns of business activity and those that can be used to pinpoint and analyze individual businesses. The former can be used to describe regional trends in business activities that may increase or decrease forest pest risk. For example, it may be possible to identify geographic areas in the United States with high levels of retail nursery sales, which may be relevant to the risk of introducing a forest pathogen. Unfortunately, such data sets cannot identify specific businesses that may represent key nodes in pest dispersal pathways. It may be useful to identify those key nodes as well as elucidate meaningful spatial patterns in terms of certain of their characteristics (e.g., business location size or sales volume). For example, a large number of retail nurseries in the Eastern United States received plants infected by the sudden oak death pathogen (Phytophthora ramorum) from west coast nurseries during the last few years. Because natural forests around infected nurseries face an elevated risk of potential infection, as do the residential landscapes served by those nurseries, the mapping of specific nursery locations may help determine the best placement of detection survey plots. This is possible using commercially available business location databases.