Mr Rupert Marquand1
1University Of Melbourne – Biosecurity Commons, Melbourne, Australia
Biography:
Rupert is an experienced science communications and media relations professional with a background in journalism. He is responsible for overseeing and implementing communications and stakeholder engagement activities for Biosecurity Commons. In particular, he develops resources for users which explain the platform in easy-to-understand terms. He has worked for universities across England and Australia for the past decade.
Abstract:
Changing climate and globalisation has dramatically increased the exposure of countries to new pests and diseases that can have devastating economic, environmental, and social impacts. Consequently, governments, industry and environmental groups must become smarter and more efficient in how they estimate and manage these risks. To meet this challenge, significant investment has focused on the development of standardised biosecurity databases and new surveillance technologies. However, a critical gap remains – the need for a standardised, easy-to-use risk analytics platform that harnesses existing data, estimates risk, and informs policy and operational decisions focused on managing biosecurity risk. Currently, cutting-edge risk analytics are developed by academics for academics and these tools are largely inaccessible to those who need them most – surveillance practitioners, policymakers, and decision-makers. This lack of access has resulted in national inconsistencies in how risk is estimated and managed, with different jurisdictions and industries utilising different models and datasets for informing operational decisions such as where to allocate finite surveillance resources.
To address this critical gap, the Centre of Excellence for Biosecurity Risk Analysis (CEBRA) in collaboration with EcoCommons, Griffith University, Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry, the Queensland government, and the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC) has developed a platform called Biosecurity Commons (www.biosecuritycommons.org.au) – an open-access, cloud-based platform for modelling and analysing biosecurity risk and response, developed for the Australian biosecurity sector.
In this presentation, I will provide an overview of what the platform offers and how it is being used to improve biosecurity management in Australia.