Inventory and Review of Quantitative Models for Spread of Plant Pests for Use in Pest Risk Assessment for the EU Territory

<p>The overall objective of this project is to review quantitative models for spread and dispersal of plant pests to be used in pest risk assessment, ensuring that all relevant evidence is identified, selected, appraised and synthesised in view of the best evidence synthesis practices. For these purposes an extensive literature search shall be performed on quantitative models of spread and dispersal of plant pests, followed by an inventory and an assessment of the fitness of these models for use in pest risk assessment.</p>
The specific objectives of the contract resulting from the present procurement procedure are:
<ol><li>to conduct an extensive literature search of quantitative models of spread and dispersal of plant pests. For this purpose, the contractor is encouraged to follow the relevant steps of the EFSA guidance on application of systematic review (SR) to food and feed safety assessments to support decision making (EFSA, 2010);</li>
<li>to produce a detailed electronic inventory of models of spread and dispersal of plant pests, following the metadata categories of the MoPest database, to allow integration of these models in the existing database;</li>
<li>to assess the fitness of these models of spread and dispersal of plant pests for their use in pest risk assessment, by conducting an analysis of the models in terms of their capacity: to incorporate landscape characteristics; to handle sparse biological data; to be used for larger taxonomic and functional groups of plant pests; to allow a dynamic estimation of the impact of plant pests; and to allow quantitative comparison of different scenarios for the factors influencing the spread process (e.g. changes in climate or land use or implementation of risk reduction option). Selected models for the different taxonomic and functional groups of plant pests should then be practically applied with case studies, including a review of their data needs in comparison with European data availability. </li></ol>