Recovery of Vegetation Following Invasive Wild Pig Eradication in a Coastal Ecosystem

Invasive wild pigs (Sus scrofa) are rapidly expanding globally, impacting native plant and animal communities and causing extensive agricultural and environmental damage. To mitigate negative impacts of wild pigs, wildlife professionals conduct control and mitigation efforts, but vegetation recovery after these efforts is rarely quantified. In 2015, the U.S. Department of Agriculture began wild pig removal efforts on Jehossee Island, South Carolina (18 km2) with a goal of eradicating the population. In this study, we present the results of wild pig removal efforts on the island. We used drone imagery collected from four 28.60-hectare plots flown during 2015–2020 to quantify changes in wildlife trail damage (i.e., a proxy for wild pig environmental damage) relative to changes in wild pig numbers on the island. In total, 459 wild pigs were removed from Jehossee Island through aerial gunning, trapping, and opportunistic shooting (removing 380, 68, and 11 wild pigs, respectively). Linear mixed-effect models indicated a decrease in total trail length on the landscape every year since initiation of control efforts, with the most significant changes occurring during the last 3 of 6 years. Zeroinflated generalized linear mixed models revealed wild pig detections had a positive relationship to trail length. Images collected from remote cameras deployed on the island from 2015–2020 confirmed no wild pigs were present on the island after 2019. This research illustrates that wild pig elimination from coastal islands may facilitate vegetation recovery. Given the widespread distribution of wild pigs throughout coastal islands in the southern U.S., which contain numerous imperiled species and environments, our findings also highlight the need for more expansive wild pig eradication and subsequent monitoring efforts coupled with in-depth studies characterizing the ecological benefits of wild pig removal within sensitive ecosystems.