The role of passive surveillance and citizen science in plant health
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CABI Agriculture and Bioscience Open Access
REVIEW
The role of passive surveillance and citizen science in plant health Nathan Brown1* , Ana Pérez‑Sierra2, Peter Crow3 and Stephen Parnell4
Abstract The early detection of plant pests and diseases is vital to the success of any eradication or control programme, but the resources for surveillance are often limited. Plant health authorities can however make use of observations from indi‑ viduals and stakeholder groups who are monitoring for signs of ill health. Volunteered data is most often discussed in relation to citizen science groups, however these groups are only part of a wider network of professional agents, landusers and owners who can all contribute to significantly increase surveillance efforts through “passive surveillance”. These ad-hoc reports represent chance observations by individuals who may not necessarily be looking for signs of pests and diseases when they are discovered. Passive surveillance contributes vital observations in support of national and international surveillance programs, detecting potentially unknown issues in the wider landscape, beyond points of entry and the plant trade. This review sets out to describe various forms of passive surveillance, identify analytical methods that can be applied to these “messy” unstructured data, and indicate how new programs can be established and maintained. Case studies discuss two tree health projects from Great Britain (TreeAlert and Observatree) to illus‑ trate the challenges and successes of existing passive surveillance programmes. When analysing passive surveillance reports it is important to understand the observers’ probability to detect and report each plant health issue, which will vary depending on how distinctive the symptoms are and the experience of the observer. It is also vital to assess how representative the reports are and whether they occur more frequently in certain locations. Methods are increasingly available to predict species distributions from large datasets, but more work is needed to understand how these apply to rare events such as new introductions. One solution for general surveillance is to develop and maintain a network of tree health volunteers, but this requires a large investment in training, feedback and engagement to maintain motivation. There are already many working examples of passive surveillance programmes and the suite of options to interpret the resulting datasets is growing rapidly. Keywords: Surveillance, Citizen science, Unstructured data, Early warning, Tree health Background Surveillance for new and emerging pests and diseases in the wider environment represents a significant challenge for regulatory bodies in plant health (Parnell et al. 2017; Carvajal-Yepes et al. 2019). There are large and complex landscapes to cover and often significant uncertainty in maps of host species. This is especially true in natural, as well as urban environments, which can be more complex *Correspondence: [email protected] 1 Woodland Heritage, P.O. Box 1331
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