PestLens: an early-warning system supporting U.S. safeguarding against exotic plant pests

摘要

The effectiveness of safeguarding and quarantine actions aimed at preventing the introduction and minimizing the impact of exotic plant pests relies on current information about those pests. National Plant Protection Organizations (NPPOs) face the following challenges: staying up to date on continuously emerging new pest information, filtering and evaluating this information, disseminating it effectively and efficiently, applying it toward decision making, and coordinating and tracking the resultingdecisions and safeguarding actions. PestLens, the web-based early-warning system of the NPPO of the United States, is designed to address all of these challenges. This paper describes the PestLens system and discusses lessons learned during system development and operation.