Sentinel nurseries to assess the phytosanitary risks from insect pests on importations of live plants

Abstract

Ornamental plants represent a major pathway of invasion for alien pests worldwide. Commodity risk analyses are carried out to assess the risk posed by a new trade in a commodity, but they are restricted by our limited knowledge of the pests carried by traded plants. We used the sentinel nursery technique to identify insects attacking woody plants imported into Europe. We established two sentinel nurseries in China, with five traded Asian plants. These nurseries were monitored for two years to obtain lists of insects that can be expected on these commodities. These records were compared with those obtained from literature surveys, which are usually the sources of information available to pest risk assessors. At each site, 105 insect species and host associations were found on sentinel plants and 90% of these associations had not been found in a previous literature survey of insect pests of the five plants. Nearly 80% of these associations were not found in an a posteriori literature survey. An assessment classified 9%, 7% and 84% of the insect records as presenting a high, moderate and low likelihood of introduction, respectively. These results show the benefit of sentinel nurseries to identify potential infestation of plant commodity imports.

Spotting the pests of tomorrow—Sampling designs for detection of species associations with woody plants

“…the chance of detecting all of the species increases with more samples. In sentinel nurseries, another important temporal factor relevant to sampling is the time of the year at which the target plants are exported (Kenis et al, ). This is especially relevant for insect pests, as if they have left the plants then they are no longer at risk of being transported with the plants (e.g.…”

“…Decisions about the sampling design must be based on the objective of the sampling. In sentinel nurseries the objective is to identify as many of the associated organisms on the plants as possible (Kenis et al, ). This is because the risk of any of the associated organisms being transferred to another region by trade of plants for planting is high.…”

“…https ://platf orm.cabi.org/fc)) and sampling in the field (e.g. Kenis et al, 2018;Mitchell et al, 2016;Shaw, Bryner, & Tanner, 2009). Since information in published literature and databases are often incomplete (e.g.…”

Forewarned is forearmed: harmonized approaches for early detection of potentially invasive pests and pathogens in sentinel plantings

“…2). In this case, the results obtained will be helpful in CRA (Kenis et al 2018). Assuming that host-parasite co-evolution of native species might not result in obvious symptom expression, a host shift to a taxonomically similar plant species in the final location of the plant may give rise to novel host-parasite interactions.…”

“…Hill) L. Lombard, M.J. Wingf. & Crous), ash dieback (Hymenoscyphus fraxineus T. Kowal), sudden oak death and ramorum leaf blight (Phytophthora ramorum Werres, De Cock & Man in 't Veld) (Santini et al 2013;Prospero and Cleary 2017;Kenis et al 2018).…”