Issue 13 | Jan/Feb 2025

Welcome to the first PSNAP newsletter for 2025

This month we are focusing on eLearning and resources, with plenty of opportunities for refreshing your knowledge and discovering something new. Here are a few highlights: 

Virtual Annual Surveillance Workshop 2025

Planning is underway for the Virtual Annual Surveillance Workshop (vASW), with the Plant Surveillance Network Working Group preparing an excellent program for PSNAP members. Stay tuned for announcements!

Strengthen your pest surveillance knowledge

The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) has created a self-paced eLearning course in collaboration with the International Plant Protection Convention (IPPC). The Surveillance and Pest Status Determination course introduces key concepts related to pest surveillance and pest status determination focusing on new pest detections and emerging pests.

Level up your learning with the National Biosecurity Training Hub

The National Biosecurity Training Hub provides an easy to navigate library of biosecurity training resources. The hub lists over 60 courses, suited to different industries, levels and skill sets.   

Plant Health Australia’s (PHA) free courses on Plant surveillance and Biosecurity surveillance: protecting Australia’s forests may be of particular interest. They are fantastic for new staff inductions or refresher training. View these courses and more on the training hub.

Pest information at your fingertips with EPPO Global Database

The European and Mediterranean Plant Protection Organisation (EPPO) Global Database provides comprehensive pest-related information. This includes details on over 97,800 species relevant to agriculture, forestry, and plant protection.

Enhance your disease management skills with USDA ARS recovery plans

The United States Department of Agriculture Agricultural Research Service (USDA ARS) has developed recovery plans as part of the National Plant Disease Recovery System. These resources may be useful to surveillance practitioners, particularly the sections on pest and disease spread and risk mapping. 

Join the Australasian Forest Health Working Group  

A new working group has been established of Australian and New Zealand forest health and biosecurity scientists. The goal is to promote collaboration and cooperation, share expertise and ideas, accelerate learning, and ensure a broad suite of expertise is available to address new and emerging forest health and biosecurity challenges in our region.

The working group is open to scientists and practitioners from government agencies, universities, forestry companies, and consultants, including those working directly in forest health and biosecurity. We also welcome those from other disciplines such as social science, Indigenous peoples, government administrators, and interested members of the public. We plan to hold quarterly online meetings, offer regular 5–10-minute speed talks, and create opportunities for visiting scientists and members to meet at conferences. The working group is voluntary and not funded.

If you are interested in joining, send a message to angus.carnegie@dpi.nsw.gov.au

What we’ve been reading: Plant surveillance news and research  

• Tiny Radar Tags Enable Novel Insights in Fruit Fly Dispersal
• Invasive pest study points to improved biosecurity responses
• Building integrated plant health surveillance: a proactive research agenda for anticipating and mitigating disease and pest emergence
• Design of risk-based surveillance to demonstrate absence of Phytophthora agathidicida in New Zealand kauri forests

Career opportunities

Visit the careers page on the PSNAP website to keep up to date with current job and PhD scholarship opportunities.

About the Network

The Plant Surveillance Network Australasia-Pacific (PSNAP) enables members to communicate and share skills in plant pest surveillance. It acts as a coordination point for surveillance professionals and practitioners to strengthen surveillance capacity and capability across Australia, New Zealand and the nearby region. 

The National Plant Biosecurity Surveillance Professional Development and Protocols Projects are coordinated and delivered by Plant Health Australia and are funded by the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry.