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Biosecurity
Science programme: Biosecurity
Biosecurity is a national priority of significant strategic importance to all productive sectors and the natural estate. HortResearch has the largest team of plant protection researchers in New Zealand, with over 80 members. We have significant capability and research activity in this area including, but not limited to, sustainable fruit production. Work in progress focuses on insects and plant pathogens.
The sustainability of New Zealand's agricultural, horticultural, arable and forestry industries, as well as the natural estate, is being eroded by ever increasing numbers of invasive, alien pests.
Recent estimates suggest around 50 new organisms per year are entering New Zealand, and biosecurity risks are increasing due to escalating global trade and tourism, new trading routes, the growing numbers of invasive alien species in our trading partners, and climate change.
New invaders are additional to pests already here, so integrated management becomes increasingly complex, with increasing risk of failure of one or more components. Threats from new invaders include direct damage to crops, disruptive control actions, and enhanced transmission of plant diseases.
Invasion rates are not likely to reduce in the foreseeable future, and there is an urgent need to find new ways to improve border biosecurity. Given the enormous and relentlessly accumulating costs associated with pests that are already established in New Zealand, contributions by these research programmes to reducing the rate of invasion by new pests should provide valuable economic and environmental benefits.
Key areas of current activity include:
- Organism risk assessment
- Pheromone and kairomone identification and deployment
- Host-range testing and insect rearing
- Classical biocontrol introductions
- Plant disease diagnostics and prediction
- New monitoring and surveillance systems
- GIS research for biosecurity
- Sterile Insect and other slow-to-spread or eradication technologies
- Novel treatments
- Fruitflies – postharvest
- New tools for IPM
Key collaborators
AgResearch, Crop & Food Research, Forest Research, Lincoln University, AgriQuality, University of Queensland, University of Hamburg, Royal Swedish Institute of Chemistry (KTH)
Key links
Contact Max Suckling
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