Search and Detection: Theory and application in disease and wildlife management’

We participated in the ‘Search and Detection: Theory and application in disease and wildlife management' conference, hosted by Landcare Research at Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand, from Nov 10 - 11, 2008. Other conference collaborators included the Australian Biosecurity CRC for Emerging Infectious Disease, Australian Wildlife Management Society, Invasive Animals CRC, and the New Zealand Ecological Society. The conference consisted of 2 days of presentations on relevant study areas (26 individual papers), including various papers on the topics of ‘Designing optimal surveillance for national or internal border biosecurity' and ‘Matching monitoring effort of rare events with the costs and risks of being wrong'. The proceedings of the conference are proposed to be published in a special issue of a journal.

We presented our paper entitled ‘Biosecurity surveillance design: detecting non-indigenous vertebrate introductions using risk and power', based on our work in CRC30084 ‘Biosecurity Quarantine Model System' and its supplementary project on vertebrates. The paper led to very positive comments and useful feedback from invasive species experts from several agencies in New Zealand and Australia. Our methodology is advanced in development and our first article has been submitted for publication, so this was timely peer review that will assist in delivery of project milestones. No other comparable methodologies for designing complex surveillance programs were presented and there are clearly many applications for our work. We discussed at least two possible collaborative projects applying our methodology in different contexts. This is also timely, given the stage of the project. Lastly, the conference was very valuable in enabling us to form general links with invasive species specialists in Australia, New Zealand and Mexico, particularly in island ecology and in veterinary fields.

We thank the CRC NPB and Landcare Research, New Zealand for supporting our attendance at this extremely worthwhile conference.