Plant pests on the horizon? New EFSA dashboard to spot them
EFSA’s new dashboard provides interactive online access to the results of its horizon scanning activities for plant pests that may pose a threat to European Union territory.
20 September 2023, EU: In collaboration with the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC) and the French Agency for Food, Environmental and Occupational Health & Safety (ANSES), EFSA systematically screens scientific literature and media sources to identify new, emerging, or recurring pests that may be a potential concern for EU territory. These horizon scanning activities feed into a monthly newsletter published in the EFSA Journal, which is shared with the European Commission and Member States’ plant health authorities to bolster the EU’s preparedness to address emerging plant health risks.
The newly created dashboard provides online access to the latest and past horizon scanning results in an interactive format. The tool has three sections:
- Emerging pests: visualisation on a world map of non-regulated pests that have been detected and are posing new threats (e.g. being found in new areas of invasion, on new hosts, etc.);
- Priority pests: amount of traffic (in terms of number of items retrieved) for 20 pests that are regulated in the EU as ‘priority pests’ and therefore receive maximum attention from Member States (through public information campaigns to the public, annual surveys, contingency plans, simulation exercises, and action plans for their eradication);
- Newsletter Search Engine: search all items included in any published newsletter by selecting pest name, family, level of regulation and monitoring score (called ‘PeMoScoring’).
The dashboard will be regularly updated with the content of the last published monthly newsletter.
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