Biosecurity Tasmania works with farmers, growers and the Tasmanian public every day to help protect our state from pests and diseases. We work hard at the border to keep out pests that aren’t currently in Tasmania, as well as conducting surveillance within Tasmania to check for the presence of pests that may have entered the state by other means.
This surveillance work allows us to confidently claim that certain pests and diseases are not present in Tasmania, when we do not detect them in traps or with other surveillance tools. The absence of plant pests and diseases gives Tasmanian growers an advantage when selling produce to overseas markets, and the surveillance we conduct supports our Tasmanian farmers and fresh produce growers to achieve this.
On Friday 26 July, Biosecurity Tasmania implemented a new digital surveillance system that further supports Tasmanian farmers and fresh produce growers. This new digital surveillance and reporting system not only improves and streamlines data collection for our inspectors, but also significantly improves our reporting capability and track the progress of samples taken from traps in real-time.
The new system, Trapbase, is now being used to support the extensive Queensland and Mediterranean fruit fly surveillance that occurs across Tasmania and in the future will be expanded to support the active surveillance of other key plant pests.
Trapbase uses QR codes to accurately map trap locations, as well as identify collected samples and link them to specific traps.
