The Role of Community and Industry Surveillance in Managing Invasive Species: a Review of Current Knowledge

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Background

The costs of biological invasions worldwide continue to rise, causing significant damage to environments, economies, and human health. Surveillance is the key tool used to detect, monitor, and manage incursions of pests and diseases. The community can play an important role in these surveillance activities. This can happen through citizen science activities, via information supplied by stakeholders of a particular industry, or through individuals who are motivated to report chance sightings of pests and diseases as they go about their everyday life. This community surveillance, often categorized as either ‘passive’ or ‘general’ surveillance, requires investment in engagement activities in order to gain support from community or industry members. Engagement activities about invasive species are known to result in increased passive and general surveillance. Understanding the factors that drive the likelihood that a pest or disease will be detected and reported by a member of the public is key to understanding the level of investment required to achieve a given level of community surveillance. This information is required if budgets are to be allocated cost-effectively between all the activities that are typically funded as part of pest-management programs - active surveillance, preparedness, management, treatment, research, and community engagement.

Currently, the evidence to quantify the relationship between investment in community engagement and the subsequent changes to reporting by the public or industry is sparse, despite a plethora of general surveillance and citizen science programs across the globe. There is anecdotal evidence that these programs tend to deliver various benefits beyond the collection of data. This warrants efforts to raise the overall understanding of biosecurity and strengthen social capital within groups that are valuable for subsequent biosecurity initiatives. Apart from providing information about cost-effectiveness, these programs could provide guidance on best-practice implementation and engagement, program management, data analysis, and use. This will lead to an understanding of changes that are required within the biosecurity system to adequately support general surveillance programs.

This Research Topic will progress our understanding of key aspects of community and industry engagement that lead to positive outcomes for invasive species management. It will investigate a range of issues and topics relevant to improving the use of community and industry in invasive species management. Contributions to this Research Topic will be from the range of disciplines associated with pest (including weeds) and disease management — economics, social science, statistics, veterinary science, ecology, psychology, and public policy. Practitioners’ perspectives are welcome. Specific topics of interest include:

• Increasing the effectiveness of community and industry engagement.
• Best practice guidelines for establishing and maintaining general surveillance programs
• Pest and disease characteristics that make them amenable to passive and general surveillance
• The use and misuse of general surveillance data
• Area-wide management of invasive species
• The potential contribution of systems thinking in maintaining general surveillance programs
• Attracting and maintaining resourcing: insights from existing general surveillance programs
• Dealing with the increased identification and diagnosis load from general and passive surveillance programs
• Enabling general surveillance programs

Keywords: passive surveillance, general surveillance, citizen science, community engagement, biosecurity, biological invasions, public detection, industry detection

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