MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA – In July 2007, Dr. Lynn A. Maguire, professor of the practice of environmental decision analysis from 91ÉçÇø¸£Àû, Durham, North Carolina, USA, visited the Australian Center of Excellence for Risk Analysis (ACERA) to participate in a project on pests of noncommercial plants.

The purpose of her visit was to help the Australian Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry (DAFF) and others concerned with these pests, to identify the objectives that should inform decisions about where to invest effort in detecting, monitoring and controlling introduced species.

To engage a broad group of scientists and managers in identifying these objectives, Maguire led two workshops.

The first workshop was held in Canberra, with about 25 people attending from federal agencies, state agencies and universities. It focused on developing a hierarchy of objectives that would be broad enough to capture the concerns of all the organizations that engage in research and management relating to pests of noncommercial plants. The aim was to provide a starting point that more specialized organizations could adapt to their own missions and pest-management problems.

The second workshop was held at the University of Melbourne, with about 18 people attending, many of whom had attended the first workshop. This group focused on articulating more specific objectives for a particular pest control problem and defining measures that could be used to evaluate the performance of alternative management actions. Using a sample plant pest problem and starting from the objectives hierarchy developed during the first workshop, participants articulated a more specific objectives hierarchy, and a set of measures for the problem.

Participants than sketched out several intensities of intervention at different points in the chain of events (that is, pre-entry, entry, detection, establishment, spread, etc.)

Participants then drew up management alternatives and estimated the performance of each of the alternatives with respect to each measure. This exercise provided a demonstration of how the objectives hierarchy could guide evaluation of management actions.

DAFF and ACERA personnel are continuing to develop this approach by constructing a Bayesian belief network to describe the sequence of uncertain events that unfold as an organism arrives at Australian borders, is or is not detected, successfully enters the local environment, becomes established, spreads beyond the point of entry, etc.

You can read more about the results of these workshops, including the objectives hierarchy, the management alternatives and performance measures at.