The Surveillance Simulation project produced a simulation environment which will be used to estimate rates of spread of a disease and its time-changing extent over the landscape. It will provide computer-based models to disease outbreak managers, to predict the spread of emergent plant diseases and pests and improve response by biosecurity teams.

Research outcomes:

• A surveillance prediction simulation platform for validating surveillance strategies,
• novel landscape-level modelling techniques for pest spread simulation, and
• validated simulation technology using historical emergency plant pest incursion data.

Research implications:

This pathway of robust, easily extensible general EPP simulators, accessed via a web-server architecture is a very viable option for future development, commercialisation and/or roll-out.

Acknowledgements:

The research team acknowledges the CRC for National Plant Biosecurity (CRCNPB) for supporting this project.

The research team also expresses sincere thanks to many other researchers at UWA, DAFWA and CSIRO who have assisted with knowledge of the behavior of many pest species and with advice and feedback about the usability of the system.