State-of-the-art Surveillance

Surveillance is an essential part of protecting New Zealand’s economic assets and natural taonga from damaging exotic organisms.

Our government currently spends over $125 million a year on monitoring for biological threats. It’s an expensive process because it requires thousands of hours of highly skilled human labour.

As part of the BioHeritage National Science Challenge the State-of-the-art Surveillance team worked to develop prototype technologies that automated and improved surveillance results, while saving costs.

Spectral imaging for urban tree health

Our research team used a camera mounted on a moving vehicle to monitor the health of our urban rākau (trees).

The camera took pictures of street trees every fortnight. Images were pre-processed to maintain people’s privacy (blurring cars, people, houses etc.) and then analysed by computer to identify what kind of trees each street had, and whether they looked damaged by pest or disease.

When we found sick trees we sent a biosecurity inspector to focus just on the damaged trees – saving time and money. It worked the other way, too: if our DNA project above discovered a new insect had entered the country, and we knew that it was a threat to a specific kind of tree, we’d have a map of where those trees are in our cities and could go inspect them.

Insect Soup: sampling eDNA with light traps

Our researchers installed UV light traps at the Port of Tauranga to help detect the arrival of foreign insects.

All of the insects caught were analysed in the lab by a process called High-Throughput Sequencing (HTS). This told us the DNA of every insect species caught in the trap.

If a new insect species or a known threat came into Tauranga, we knew where and when it was collected, and we could take steps to eradicate it.

Developing DNA diagnostic technologies like this allowed us to cost-effectively scale-up our efforts to find new pests early. This early detection is essential for protecting our natural and productive environments.

Dr Manpreet Dhami (Manaaki Whenua – Landcare Research) spoke about our eDNA research at this webinar: