New funding announcement for Small Business Research Initiative: Plant health innovations for biosecurity

What are regulated plant pests and diseases?

What challenge areas are in scope?

1. Developing innovative technologies and practices to enhance border inspections of traded plants for planting and plant commodities, including wood and wood products, improving sampling accuracy, detection rates of regulated pests, time and resource efficiency of inspectors. 

 Preventing the arrival of pests and pathogens through imports is a priority due to the socio-economic and environmental costs caused if damaging pathogens and pests are able to establish.

Border inspections apply a risk-based but time-consuming approach by which large volumes of planting stock or wood products (e.g. timber, firewood, pallets etc.) must be manually inspected. Targeted and non-targeted tools that allow inspectors to detect and diagnose pests and pathogens more efficiently and accurately in large consignments, have the potential to improve border biosecurity.

Solutions could potentially utilise sensing technologies (spectral, acoustic and olfactory) that would allow detection to occur quickly and passively with less unpacking and disturbance of products.

Some pests and pathogens can be latent when they arrive at the border and so visually detectable symptoms may not be present until after inspection has occurred. Innovation in the detection and diagnosis of latent pests and pathogens, would provide significant advantages to our biosecurity. 

2. Enhancing in-land inspections of plants in nurseries, recently planted sites or the wider environment, through the application of innovative technologies and practices to enable pest and pathogen detection in the field, reducing the risk of outbreaks.

Our technological capabilities to diagnose pests and pathogens in lab environments have developed dramatically over the past few decades; however, most plant health inspections on nurseries, agricultural land, in parks/gardens, woodlands and forests still rely on ground surveys and visual techniques. The effective deployment of innovative technologies, or improved survey methodologies, that allow us to ‘enhance the senses’ of both inspectors and growers is an opportunity to increase the accuracy and efficiency of inspections.

Furthermore, by empowering more growers and traders to perform their own in-field testing and improving the accessibility of self-testing diagnostic technology and practices, the trade of infected commodities could be reduced in a risk-based, and more time and resource-efficient way.

Innovative tools and practices that can be used quickly, easily, and reliably by growers and traders could help them to make informed management decisions, reduce the amount of time and resources required for Inspectorate visits, and mitigate against potentially avoidable negative impacts from the presence of plant pest and diseases. We encourage tools that are practical, easy to use and provide immediate results, which may be followed by a lab-based diagnosis.

3. Utilising passive and scanning surveillance approaches to provide timely and cost-effective methods for detecting pests and diseases in different landscape settings.

Passive or scanning surveillance, which involves a technology or practice that is set up to collect data over time with minimal human intervention, could reduce the cost and time required for inspectorate visits and utilise signals of pest and pathogen presence that the human eye or random sampling is unlikely to detect.

Current passive surveillance options, such as sticky traps and pheromone trapping, are often non-descript or may not be best suited to the pests and diseases currently of greatest concern in Britain. The development of accurate, effective, and cost-efficient passive surveillance tools that can target high-risk pests could improve detection and offer more options to landowners, growers, and the Inspectorate.

 Wider environment inspections (e.g. in woodlands or crop fields) can present unique geographic challenges such as covering large areas and navigating uneven, obstructed, and dense terrain. Remote sensing approaches and accompanying tools, such as Geographic Information System (GIS) mapping, could improve the inspection, access, and management of terrain that would otherwise be difficult to navigate.

4. Managing the supply of potentially infected or infested plants and plant commodities pre and post border, presenting alternative treatments to destruction following detection of a quarantine organism, reducing financial losses whilst maintaining biosecurity.

Immediate destruction is the usual procedure for securely disposing of a plant or plant commodity that is contaminated with a pest or pathogen. Whist this management strategy is the fastest way of ensuring biosecurity, it comes at an economic cost for traders, and a potentially greater environmental footprint (e.g. use of pesticides or felling of infected trees) to alternatives.

The reduction in the availability of broad-spectrum pesticides means that there is a need for new sustainable, effective, and readily available methods to replace these chemicals. By supporting a broad range of treatment options that are rapidly effective and could be applied pre or post border, we could improve the prevention of pest incursions and reduce the need for commodity destruction.

 Whilst the destruction of commodities identified to carry high risk pests and diseases is likely to continue, solutions could find a balance that promotes biosecurity and reduces economic losses for traders. Solutions may lie in identifying and applying efficient ways of treating medium to low-risk pests and pathogens; therefore, reducing the proportion of infected commodities that require destruction.

 For wood and bark products that are detected with a pest or pathogen, effective phytosanitary treatments that do not damage the commodity are more readily available than that of other plant derived products. However, it may be possible that new phytosanitary treatments could satisfy the need to treat pest and pathogen risks associated with trade in wood and bark products, whilst further supporting a range of additional common objectives.