Plant health data from Belgian Plant Sentinel Network

The enclosed files contain the questions (in Dutch, English & French) and the responses from tree surveys conducted under the Belgian Plant Sentinel Network.

Background to the project

Botanic gardens and arboreta possess outstanding scientific collections of a wide diversity of plants, frequently growing outside their natural geographical range. These can be used as sentinels for both early detection of emerging pests and for potentially invasive pests. This is why the International Plant Sentinel Network was launched by EUPHRESCO (EUropean PHytosanitary RESearch COordination), an international network of organisations funding research projects and coordinating national research programmes in the phytosanitary area. International Network developed a transnational network consisting of gardens, diagnostic laboratories and National Plant Protection Organisations, working together in order to provide an early warning system for new and emerging plant pests and diseases. It focused on developing tools and took place in a limited number of countries.

Belgium did not participate in the first phase of International Plant Sentinel Network, even though there are many botanic gardens and arboreta in the country. The largest of them is Meise Botanic Garden, which is one of the largest botanic gardens in the world (92 ha).  Besides Meise there are several gardens with diverse and unique collections spread all over the country. Among these gardens many have staff members with good knowledge of plant protection, which assure the control of pests and diseases in the collections of the gardens. On the other hand, up to now there have been only limited interactions between the gardens and the National Reference Laboratories for plant pests and diseases. It would be interesting to strengthen these interactions, both for the gardens and arboreta, for a better management and protection of their living collections, and for the Reference Laboratories, in order to gather more data on the presence of pests and diseases in the country.

That is why we have created a Belgian network similar to international network, aiming at supporting national plant health policy by early warning of new pest threats, and meanwhile operating in the new transnational initiative of the international network. Together they can form a dense Belgian network to gather data and expand the surveillance of emerging pests over the entire national territory. They also hold most of the plant diversity present in the whole country.

Standardized methods and tools for making the plant health surveys have been developed by the International Plant Sentinel Network during its first phase from 2013 to 2016. One of these tools is the Plant Health Checker, a form for making standardized surveys of trees. Two versions are available, one for surveying deciduous trees and one for conifers, as the symptoms to watch for differ between these two groups in some cases. Each form is available in English as a paper form with two sides. Moreover, a reference guide with instructions on how to use the checker had also been made with it, as well as a guide to taking photographs for diagnostic purposes.

For the Belgian project we adapt these forms in order to facilitate their use. We translated them to French and Dutch, the two main languages of the country, so that all gardeners could use them. A second goal was to adapt them to the test cases selected for the project. Indeed, some symptoms that are important for these organisms are not included in the original plant heath checker, mainly concerning the symptoms on roots for the root-knot nematode and Phytoplasma case. A third aim was to investigate whether the forms could be simplified for making the surveys in the field. For the latter, however, it was decided to await the user experience of the first year, so as to make an evaluation and suggest eventual amendments.

It is also planned to develop an electronic version of the checker form, so as to be able to input the survey data directly in digital format and thus skipping a second and tedious step of entering the data from paper forms into the computer. Moreover, it is preferable to have a system which can easily make the data available to a central data system. That is why we chose to use Google Forms within Google Drive, because it can be utilized as a central data system and flexible, and has many functionalities such as sharing the data. This system also allows the direct input of data with an internet connection.