AbstractThe invasive emerald ash borer (Agrilus planipennis) causes damage to street trees which is estimated to reach US$ 900 million over the next 30 years. Although millions of dollars are spent annually to control this species, spatiotemporal management plans are often based on rules of thumb that ignore future pest dispersal. Here, we reveal an optimal management strategy to protect urban trees in North America from A. planipennis. To achieve this, we embedded a pest dispersal model within a mixed integer programming framework. We discovered that optimized strategies consistently outperformed those based on rules of thumb, potentially resulting in the protection of an additional nearly 1 million street trees and savings of $ 629 million. Critically, the best management strategies always relied on quarantines and biological control (constituting 98–99% and 1–2% of the project budget, respectively), in contrast with current practices, where federal spending has been diverted to biological control. Our findings serve to inform future pest control efforts and can help protect many more trees from this invasive species.