New monitoring tool to put the brakes on illegal plant trade in Australia
Through the Centre for Invasive Species Solutions, researchers from the University of Adelaide have developed a new surveillance tool to monitor the online trade of plants on domestic and international e-commerce sites that will help combat biosecurity threats from illegal plant trade.
Opuntia cacti were one of the alien plant species traded on e-commerce websites identified by University of South Australia researchers. Credit: Ingrid Fernandes, pexels.com.
Emerging illegal trade of novel alien plant species, facilitated by e-commerce marketplaces, is anticipated to lead to future alien plant invasions into Australia. While Australia invests heavily in preventative biosecurity for pest plants, comparatively little is known about the quantity and diversity of species traded domestically on Australian e-commerce and online trade platforms.
To date the capacity to predict future incursions of declared plant species via Australian e-commerce and online trade platforms has been limited by the paucity of research but this Centre project, funded by the Australian Government Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry, now provides a long-term automated monitoring tool that greatly improves Australia’s biosecurity.
Researchers compiled a list of target weeds of 1236 distinct taxa. They also undertook data cleaning of three e-commerce websites detecting nearly 1400 instances of 154 declared plants being traded across all states and territories. Those traded in the greatest quantities included Opuntia cacti, aquatic weeds and invasive garden species with 414 of the detections deemed to be illegal.
The project has led to the development of the Digital Surveillance for Illegal Wildlife Trade (DIWT) database which has been trialed by biosecurity officers in all states and territories.
The project also led to an unexpected research outcome which was the consolidation of a national list of weed declarations in each jurisdiction which has been verified by relevant biosecurity policy officers in each state and territory and is anticipated to be a valuable resource to the Australian nursery industry.
Another unexpected outcome has been the use of these web scrapers in the assessment of weeds proposed for eradication by the Queensland Department of Agriculture which led to the selection and assessment of the aquatic plant Limocharis flava. Fortunately, analysis of the online plant trade showed no evidence of L. flava on e-commerce sites and as such the risk of sale was deemed low at the time of investigation. The result demonstrated how valuable domestic trade information sourced from the DIWT database can be for weed risk assessments.