Background NSW Government

Following recommendations from a review of weed management in NSW by the Natural Resources Commission in 2014, the NSW Environmental Trust (hereafter ‘the Trust’) decided to invest in biocontrol research for priority environmental weeds in NSW. A partnership between the Trust and a consortium comprising the CSIRO, NSW DPIRD and NSW NPWS, was established to scope a project, which was approved by the Trust’s Board in May 2016.

For this project, the general definition of an environmental weed is:

A species that invades and/or impacts on native communities and ecosystems. This might be through competing for resources; prevention of recruitment; alteration of geomorphological, soil, fire or hydrological processes; genetically modifying local native plants; or those that cause changes to fauna populations or geography.

Project scope

The project’s overarching goal is ‘To reduce the impact of weeds on the NSW environment through the selection and deployment of appropriate and effective biocontrol agents’.

The intent is to extend on existing successful biocontrol research, undertaken in Australia or elsewhere, which focuses on new classical biocontrol agents with potential to provide long-term solutions for specific environmental weeds in NSW.

The project does not, unless under exceptional circumstances, undertake explorations for new candidate biocontrol agents in the native range or research on endemic natural enemies of weeds with potential for biocontrol use. It rather concentrates efforts on already identified promising candidate agents from the native range that have potential for use in NSW but require additional research to demonstrate their safety before an application for their release in Australia can be submitted to the relevant authorities.

Activities

The project comprises different components, which capture the key steps of biocontrol programs (see flow diagram below):

  • Development of a framework to prioritise weed targets for biocontrol research, and its implementation and regular reviews and updates.
  • Research into new candidate biocontrol agents to gather the necessary information to support applications for release in Australia.
  • Release and evaluation of new agents approved for release in Australia.

Schematic of all the steps involved in a typical biocontrol program. Host-specificity tests are sometimes performed in the native range, but it can be a challenge for another country to import Australian native plants to another country. Blue boxes = activities that are the responsibility of the research provider; Yellow boxes = activities that involve engagement from communities members; Green boxes = activities to quantitatively evaluate the impact of the biocontrol agent, typically involving the research provider who was responsible for the release of the agent; Grey boxes = the different approvals required from Australian regulators. The red dots represent possible ‘stop points’ where further work could be deemed unnecessary based on outcomes of the previous step.