Changing climate and increasing globalisation of human movement and trade has dramatically increased the exposure of countries to new pests and diseases that can have devastating economic, environmental, and social impacts. Consequently, governments and industry must become smarter and more efficient in how they estimate and manage these risks.
To meet this ever-increasing challenge, significant investment has focused on the development of standardised biosecurity databases and new surveillance technologies. However, a critical gap remains: the need for a standardised, easy-to-use risk analytics platform that harnesses existing data, estimates risk, and ultimately, informs policy and operational decisions focused on managing biosecurity risk.
Currently, cutting-edge risk analytics are developed by academics, for academics. Consequently, these tools are largely inaccessible to the people who need them most — policymakers, decision-makers and surveillance practitioners. This lack of access has resulted in national inconsistencies in how risk is estimated and managed, with different jurisdictions and industries utilising different models and datasets for informing operational decisions such as where to allocate finite surveillance resources.
To address this critical gap, between 2021 and 2023, the Centre of Excellence for Biosecurity Risk Analysis (CEBRA) in collaboration with EcoCommons, Griffith University, Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry, the Queensland government, and the ARDC, developed a platform called Biosecurity Commons. Biosecurity Commons is an open-access, cloud-based platform for modelling and analysing biosecurity risk and response, developed specifically for the Australian biosecurity sector.
Biosecurity Commons contains a range of reproducible and sharable analytical workflows that are useful for informing a range of biosecurity policy and operational decisions.
These include:
In May 2023, Biosecurity Commons was officially launched as a pilot platform, empowering researchers and decision-makers to produce reproducible, sharable and transparent models and analytics without coding experience or high-end IT equipment.
In this second phase, Biosecurity Commons is working with stakeholders and end-users to build real world use cases that can be used as templates while also identifying required platform refinements to meet the needs of the biosecurity sector. Stage 2 is supported by the ARDC’s Planet Research Data Commons through the Modelling, Analytics and Decision Support Infrastructure (MADSI) focus area. MADSI is building national infrastructure that provides easy access to scientific models, analysis and decision-support tools, and platforms.
In stage 2 of the Biosecurity Commons, a partnership with the Plant Biosecurity Response Reform at the Australian Government Department of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (DAFF) will support the Biosecurity Commons to move from a proof-of-concept phase to a trial and evaluation stage, with the goal of enhancing biosecurity risk management, data accessibility, and cross-sector collaboration.
To achieve this, the Biosecurity Commons team is piloting functionality with end-users across a wide range of stakeholders on real-world problems. These stakeholders include commonwealth and state government agencies, local councils and industry groups.
Biosecurity Commons will engage with stakeholders to ensure existing workflows meet the needs of end-users, while also providing the opportunity to develop real-world case studies that can be used as templates and tutorials to guide new users in learning and adopting cutting-edge Biosecurity Commons workflows and models.
Two additional industry-funded projects will begin in July 2024. These projects are focused on further enhancing existing functionality and increasing awareness and uptake of Biosecurity Commons across the Australian plant health sector.
This 5-year, $10 million collaborative project between AUSVEG, Plant Health Australia (PHA), Victorian Department of Energy, Environment and Climate Action (DEECA), Queensland Department of Agriculture and Forestry (QDAF), the WA Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development (DPIRD) and the Centre of Excellence for Biosecurity Risk Analysis (CEBRA) aims to ensure that the Australian vegetable industry is more prepared in the face of increased biosecurity threats and ready to respond to new pest incursions when they arrive, with a key objective to drive to business continuity.
Biosecurity Commons involvement in this project is to develop nationally consistent and fit-for-purpose risk analytics for the Australian vegetable industry that can be leveraged by all plant industries. Activities will focus on developing national risk maps, spread models and surveillance designs for priority vegetable pests identified by stakeholders. A direct outcome of this work will be to produce transparent and nationally consistent decision support tools for the purposes of informing pest/disease freedom and where to direct resources for targeted surveillance programs. Like the FWPA project, this project will include scoping out the potential alignment of Biosecurity Commons workflows with AusPestCheck and other biosecurity curated databases managed by industry, government agencies and other organisations.
Access Biosecurity Commons, launched in May 2023. Read the launch announcement.
For the first time, researchers, government and practitioners across organisations can share biosecurity data and reproducible models and analytics. This will build trust, transparency and confidence in model outputs, and accelerate research through the reuse and repurposing of existing models.
At the end of stage 1, the platform has made previously inaccessible state-of-the-art scientific methods available to decision-makers and researchers to investigate questions pertinent to biosecurity operations. These include:
Members of the Plant Health Policy Branch Surveillance Group have been actively testing and using the platform and liaising with jurisdictions about the potential of the platform to share data and models for informing operational decisions. This is a significant step towards understanding the needs of end-users (and refining workflows as needed) as well as building national capacity in state-of-the-art biosecurity risk analysis.
Researchers and decision makers in the government, university, environment and agriculture sectors benefit from the project’s core features:
Our partners are:
We acknowledge and thank the partners who were part of Stage 1 (2021 to 2023):
The delivery of Biosecurity Commons Stage 2 will:
