 And let's keep the break, and you can pass the pass to this. You know what you're doing. Of course. Okay. It's very much for coming along. It is a great pleasure to have our speaker today at the CC seminar series, Kylie Island. I asked Kylie to introduce herself. So she will do the hard part of this seminar. And we have up to five people on Zoom. Good morning, everyone on Zoom. This lecture is recorded and it may go live on open pathology, you do general. So over to you. Awesome. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. It's really great to be here. Let me say to give you a bit of my background and we'll get to why we know each other as well, which is nice. So I guess I'm a pathologist by training. I actually went through UQ. So I'm a Queensland girl from my back. And then I actually moved to WA to Murdoch University and did my PhD in plant biosecurity. I worked on sudden oak death or by top for a reward, which we don't have in Australia. And hopefully we never have in Australia knocking all sorts of wood. And I was never a big molecular plant pathologist. Plant pathology has gone very molecular in the last few years. But what I did was a bit of field work and post-range testing, as well as I've got the image there. I did what's called climax modeling. So climax, which is like a climate suitability modeling program, as well as spending time in the lab. And my undergrad, I did arts as well. So actually my PhD thesis, I did science into policy and management as well. So try and look at, we do all this research. How do we get it into things? And sudden oak death, which is a very political pathogen, had a really cool look at that. And one of the key takeaways for me is that relationships matter. There's somewhere like Oregon where they're managing that pest really well. You've got whole groups of people who've come through the same PhD lab and then end up in government. And it makes that connection for getting information flow much easier. And then other places like the UK actually have better structures at a kind of higher level, governmentally and stuff like that. And then I went and worked on motorists shortly after that, which is where I met from. So that was a nice little surprise that I'm used to working the lab with me. It was a very great help at the time. And then following that, as many of you know, sometimes it's hard to secure that job, the job, you know. And I had the opportunity to be an Australian volunteer overseas. So LinkedIn with the Crawford Fund working in Paxay in Southern Laos. And that's the picture here at the top there. That's Professor Lester Burgess. If any of you have come across him, you do not forget him. He's got lots of energy more than I do. And he's well-agreed, I think now. But it was such an incredible experience. If you ever get the opportunity, you know, you just have to jump both feet in. It's like opening a second-year plant pathology textbook when you go there. It's just lots of classic plant diseases. And working across those linguistic boundaries and cultural boundaries and looking at different ways to manage pests. So I'm a very tactile kind of learner, tactile person. So that was really great. But LinkedIn with a lot of, through Lester especially, you know, we sent a lot of cultures down to the culture collection in New Zealand. The ICMP with Bevin Weir. We had experts in Phytophora and Pythium come over. Experts in Pizzeria come over and run all these workshops to get cultures into scientific collections as well as to teach the staff how to diagnose diseases and then manage them into the field. From there, I went and did two post-ops. So they one ran into the other CSIRO in Canberra. Canberra's not that bad. If you're looking at a job there, I can highly recommend it. And certainly if you're more of a molecular plant pathologist, that's where they're concentrating a lot of their plant pathology and molecular plant pathology these days. But I worked in more of a plant-by-security kind of risk modelling project and then projects that I loved working on biocontrol. And often in biocontrol you get to work with rusts and things like that and actually just getting to work with those biotrophs that if you love them and you hate them and I know that Levy knows that well as well, trying to keep your babies alive. But yeah, again, it's that amazing amount of being able to go and do fieldwork. So this is me doing fieldwork on African box lawn to collect cultures and lab and then also working in the lab in... I think it's pretty much one of the only purpose-built kind of facilities like it is that there's a basic three in Canberra. So you can actually work on plant pathogens in a growth chamber kind of thing. So again, it's similar to what you've got with the negative pressure here in that facility. So really interesting stuff. And then I'm ready to Levy doing this project. So I'm not too shy, I love to talk. And so I became an extension coordinator for the Australian countryside resistance extension network. And so bringing together plant pathologists from all across Australia to get the knowledge into one place and deliver that to Australian grain growers. And that was really, really interesting, really dynamic. I never thought I'd find countryside resistance that interesting. But pathogens continue to... evolve, they continue to shift and shape to what we do. That was a lot of project management. And keeping in mind as you're going through your degrees and that you're learning a lot of what we call more soft skills and don't underestimate or don't undervalue the soft skills or the project management you do do. And yeah, I've got my sister here today, but our other sister as well has done her PhD in psychology and she didn't go into clinical psychology and she's used all of her project management skills and that to go through Queensland Health and be doing project management at different levels. So just keeping an open mind and you might need to sell yourself differently because it's... I do miss the days of applying for a science job where it's like, you need this technical skill and you meet it when you're doing those other ones. It's a little bit more challenging at first, but it's just don't underestimate the value of what you've done and what that means. And then I returned to plant ecology and plant biosecurity in 2021. I actually got one of those small, miracle, permanent jobs that do exist out there. And I really love plant biosecurity. So let's use that modelling that I've learned and it's a lot of desktop-based work that I do. So that's what I'll kind of be presenting. My day job is supposed to be pest risk assessment. So especially in Western Australia, we don't have a lot of tests that we have on the East Coast. So we actually go through and we say, okay, we don't have this pest. How is it most likely to come in? Then we actually have to go through a whole lot of steps to say what the risk of it coming on that pathway is. And then if that's above what we call an allowable level of protection, we also look at what other management or policies could be put in place to protect WA agriculture. But about... Must have been about four months into the job. I started in April. I was put onto the Polyfagus shot hole for response. So I'll go through it today kind of what PSHP is, what being a response looks like, as well as what being a subject matter expert looks like in that context. So Polyfagus shot hole borough, it was reported through this like a little symbol here, the My Pest Guide reporter app, which actually will be rolled out in a lot of different states in the coming years. So a lot of states are summing up to it. And it was just a woman in a backyard. You can see these images here. She had some limbs come down in weather and it's quite phenomenal symptoms. You've got a board all through that tree, weakening a limb, coming down in bad weather. You also get what we call tree noodles. So the beetles don't eat the wood. They just bore in. The grass sort of wood comes out behind them. And you also get these wet patches around the holes that they make as well. So she had reported on two 30-year-old box elder maple trees in the South Oberbees free mantle and it was the first detection in Australia. And that image at the back is when we did detect it and we haven't yet detected it anywhere else, we went in and we actually destroyed that tree to try and reduce the risk of the beetle going anywhere else. So Polyfagus shop Holborra, the species name is Eulacea fornicatus. It's an ambrosia beetle. You might be wondering why a plant pathologist is working on an insect. Number one in government, sometimes you just adapt and you get the work done. But this one actually carries a fungus as well. So it doesn't actually eat the wood. It has specialised little sacks in its mouth and carries its claws with it. So you can't separate one without the other. It's not a systemic fusarium like you might be familiar with. That fusarium goes with the beetle, beetle goes with the fusarium. And they're ambrosia clay fusarium species, which sit in the fusarium salami species complex. For those of you who are taxonomists to know how complicated that particular group is. So it excavates those tunnels and you can see a few of the tunnels here with that blackness. And you can see the edge of where that fusarium is growing to it as well. That's a highly susceptible species there. And it's that dual action of the gallery than the fungus growing into that space, which just erupts water flow and you get tree dieback. And in some cases, tree dead. So where did it come from? I guess for the biologists in the room, this is always the exciting and interesting part. So they're native to Southeast Asia, so right in the middle here. And there you get a diversity of what we call haphalotypes of the beetle, as well as the fusarium species. And what we do know is there's three main areas where it's invasive. So you've got southern California, Israel and South Africa. And they share a common haphalotype of the beetle and they share a common fusarium species, fusarium eulacidae. There is a small little population first actually detected by an Australian researcher who was over there doing Macadamia research, but it hasn't really been causing big problems in Hawaii. And it's also got fusarium eulacidae, but is a haphalotype of the beetle that is different to other places. I've just put the novel number there simply because it came out after the others came out in terms of numbers. But we're interesting because we've ended up with a different haphalotype of the beetle which could mean that it's come from a different source population to the other locations and a different fusarium species called AFA team. So it's yet to be described. And the interesting thing is we know that that beetle haphalotype has been recorded in Taiwan and Vietnam and that that fusarium species has been detected in Taiwan previously as well. So that's not to say that it's come from Taiwan because, you know, especially in native range is trying to get enough reach to know exactly how complicated it is across the whole native range. But it gives us an idea that potentially it's come through a different pathway than from those other invaded areas. And we have some whispers that H38 has been detected since in South Africa or it's not whispers, it is in published literature. And so they think they've had more than one invasion event in South Africa. So that's why, even though we've got one, we don't want any more. And for those who understand, you know, species specificity, we could see a different post range on the basis of having a different fusarium species. So life history, this is a really difficult beetle to manage. It spends most of its life in a tree. Why wouldn't you? You know, there are only two millimetres in size, so you're going to stick where you say. I find that you... I mean, I know fungal biology is incredible anyway, but with these insects, they have what we call a haplodiploid mating system. So I only need a single beetle. She doesn't even need to be mated to be able to start a whole population. So she'll usually arrive in the tree. She'll weigh the first kind of lot of haploidies, which can become male. When there is hatch, she will then mate with those, basically her children. My sister's face is looking fantastic. We have a great time with the public talking about this. And so then she basically can weigh eggs that then become female because it's the females that fly, so they're the most important for spreading. And you get this very female-biased sex ratio. So if you do happen to see a PSHB, it's more than likely going to be a female beetle coming out of the tree. The males will come out every now and then, but they don't move very far. It has a really short development time for a beetle. So at optimum conditions or so of 24 degrees, 22 days, and they'll have overlapping generations. So it can just build up numbers very rapidly. It's normally about a month life cycle. And the problem for us in WA is that that means they're likely to just keep reproducing all year round. And we saw that even into the depths of our winter, we were still seeing lots of press, which was telling us there were active beetles moving around, reinfesting, reinfesting. Really high reproductive rate. You know, from 20 to 50. So you can imagine, again, it's like talking about the good things we all understand coded these days, but those numbers can just exponentially grow up. And the females are the ones that fly. And they're only two millimetres long, so they usually won't fly very far. They can, we can't have some data to indicate maybe 400 metres, but usually only 30 to 35 metres. And I don't call them lazy. I think they're smart. They don't express suitable hosts. They won't go long distances usually. So as I said, they're very, very small. These are great, this is a great image from our colleagues at CSIRO, who are sequencing the whole genome of eulacicornicardis. And then the males, you can see, they're much smaller. So it's about two millimetres or so for female, about 1.6 millimetres for a little male beetle. It tends to be a little lighter in colour as well. So very small, which makes them hard to find, especially if they're up in a tree canopy. And the symptoms that we're looking for are shock holes, which are about 1 millimetre or so, in width, perfectly round. Like, you think someone's gone in with a little perfect camera and done this, but, you know, these females never cease to amaze me. And so we often, when we ask the public to take images, we get them to put a pan or something in the image so we can gauge the size of the shock holes. They form these galleries, which is where they reproduce. You'll get the crust, which is all the wood that they don't, they're not eating it. That needs to just come out of the tree. You'll get gumming in some trees, so that's like a host resource to the beetle there. The lesions and stain, which can indicate that the fusarium's growing really actively around that shock hole there. And in some hosts, like avocados and others, you get what we call sugar-volcanoes. And so that's, again, similar to the gumming, a response to physical kind of damage. And polyfagus, poly, many vagus eats, you know, it eats a lot of hosts. There's still a lot of... There's still its preferred host, though. So the current top hosts for us are a lot of deciduous exotic trees to Australia and WA, so... Excuse me. You've got your maples, your oats, your plain trees, your coral trees, your avocados, your ravenians, or locusts, they're sometimes called figs, which we're quite worried about. The figs that it's hitting in WA are East Coast species, so we really probably want to keep PSHB contained over to us and poplars as well. And I'll show you some of the key hosts that we've found as well a bit later on. But literally, you've got hundreds of other susceptible hosts. You know, there's 400-plus taxa that are recorded as being attacked by PSHB. You know, you've got the chocolate at the top of the fridge, and the chocolate is the ace in the window or the box out of the maple. And these, if they own the vicinity, these trees will get hit like no other. You can see why it's called shophold. I've literally had my bosses feel like, I think someone's rendered this on a computer program and it's not. They just literally, sometimes they're almost in perfect little grids, very good little shopholds. And a box elder maple, if it gets invested by PSHB, typically will only live for two years. So we're talking about a fig into a tree being taken out inside two years. It's quite a lot of damage. So I work for the Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development. So what are we doing about PSHB? So the first thing to understand is that we work within a national framework. And I'll cover this in a minute. So when something new comes into Australia, everyone needs to be at the table to discuss how to manage it, how important it is. We put in a quarantine area and we restrict movement of risk guidance in that area. We're doing a lot of trapping and surveillance. We are destroying and managing infested trees. We work with three waste facilities for those who have never thought about where your waste goes. I always think of it as a wicked web of waste. Like everything that you put out on your verge has to go. So when we're working with a pest like this, we really have to work closely with local governments to make sure that we're stopping the risk material from moving out, but we still need to let waste move so no one's going to be happy if they still have their waste in their backyard next week, right? So it's a constant battle with that one. And with that, we do a lot of trapping around those sites then to help mitigate that risk. And lots and lots of communications and stakeholder engagement. So we put out Facebook marketplace or different Facebook ads. We have, you know, if you're on gum tree or something you might put in firewood but an ad will come up to remind you don't move anything that looks like it has shot holes or you're not allowed to move this material out of this area. As well as just all the local governments, all the people who have infested trees and working with them, it's a really big lot of work as well as communicating around us being from plant by security. Some people could easily confuse us with being with general by security for humans in COVID time. So it was really important to have some good comms around that as well. So when an exotic pest like PSHB arrives in Australia, we all kind of adhere to what's called the emergency plant pest response plan or the D where there's a whole lot of decisions made between all of the different state actors and then also if industry is involved, they also come to the table. So pretty much within the first 24 hours of us realising that it's new to Australia. So obviously the labs get the material, they go through it. They'll do a full father genetic tree and things like that and they go, this is not being reported in Australia before. So it's between the diagnostic labs as well as talking to plant by security because we have a lot of data as well. Then that gets reported to our box who then reports it and for us in WA, that's Dr Sonja Broughton who's our chief plant by security officer. She reports to the Australian Chief Plant Protection Officer where the moment is Dr Gabrielle Vivian Smith and then they convene what's called the Consultative Committee on Emergency Plant Pest. So CCEPP and they're a technical body. So that's made up of all of your chief plant health officers from each state as well as any representative from any affected industry partners. So in our case, you know, because it's trees and street trees, you've got things from nursery and garden through to some of the avocados and things like that that have a state in this test. Occasionally you'll have what's called a scientific advisory panel and for this test we did have one because we don't know everything. So this included experts from overseas as well as each state who then had a more in-depth look at the literature and fed back to that CCEPP to help them make their decisions. They make a recommendation and within our response at the moment we're looking to be going for a phased eradication response over three years, so quite a long time. And that's now going to go to what's called the National Management Group. So you have the technical and then you have the political and financial. So the NMG is the one who says, yep, let's put the money for this, let's go. And they sign up on the response plan. And that will go through a few iterations until the incident is closed. Either it's eradicated or it gets difficult and maybe there needs to be some decisions made about transition to management. But that's some years away for us at the moment unless something big happens. So for example, Myrtle Rust in Australia when it first arrived was a response and pretty early on they discovered they couldn't eradicate it. Brusts are very difficult and they went into what was called a transition to management period just to prepare industry and the public for what's coming ahead. So where I sit within the response, so we have our Chief Plant Health Officer, Gabrielle Biven-Smith. You have what's called an incident controller. So I find this interesting because as researchers we're often used to just doing everything ourselves and just figuring it out and go, go, go. And in response you have very clear roles of who does what. So we have public information who does all of our comms, planning. So as the name suggests, we plan things and then we pretty much, and that's where I sit in as a subject matter expert, we then communicate to operations and operations are people who are out, boots on the ground, looking at trees, doing all of that work. We all work closely with logistics so if you need anything, and it's actually really nice for it to be that clear, right? You need something in response to your, oh, we need plastic bags for collecting plant material and you don't go to bunnies and get it yourself. You let your logs know and logs don't find it for you. Or for our purposes, we're doing a lot of work with surveillance and so we need lures and so they're the ones who do all of that hard work to get the lures into the country. And then of course you can't go anywhere with that finance and admin. It's, in our, the operations is kind of the biggest part of what we do at the moment, followed by planning and logistics and then we've got one officer in public information so he works very, very hard. He's very good at his job markets, is he? And we also have a finance and admin person who kind of comes in and out. So they sometimes bleed over between roles. The logistics people often will be doing a bit of finance and admin as well. So what have we done so far? We've been pretty busy. So this is just the Perth metro area. That's the outline of the quarantine area. And all of those orange sites are sites that we had visited and inspected trees are. So just in a snapshot, so that quarantine area is covering more than 600 square kilometres. 21 local government areas. And especially when we're talking about rain waste, we found it much easier to draw this line on the map around local government areas because each LGA has its own waste streets. So it made it a lot easier to work on that because sometimes you might say, oh, we only expect the pest to go two kilometres or something like that and you might draw a circle. But in our, because we knew it would be moving in waste, it was better to set it at LGA's. So far we've had 243 infested premises. So that could be a premises someone's backed up or it could be a whole park. So we've got King's Park, which is quite large, which has a few trees on it as well. And so we hit the crazy number of we've inspected more than 1 million trees in the last 10 months. So the response. So that's an incredible amount of work. We're taking more than 30,000 samples. We've deployed over 3,000 traps. The teams have gone more than 300,000 kilometres just to cover what we do. And you'll notice we've got positive trees, 353. Trees removed is 358. That number is slightly out because we also have some rules around there are certain trees like the Voxel that we know will be infested. So if they're found within 50 metres with symptoms, we will take them out as well because we could get the result but realistically it's going to come back positive. So let's just move quicker to try and control that test. And some species, not all species are equal when they get hit by PSHB. So you've got the chocolate at the top with the Voxel that, you know, you might just get a high viscous plant or something and just have shop holes in it. So you'll only take off the limb of that tree and you won't really see re-infestation. So we approach each species on a species-by-species basis. The quarantine area basically people can't move risk material out. So we know that if material that's infested is chipped to 2.5 centimetres and it's to do with the movement of the chipping kills 99.9% of the beetles. The data is really quite strong. When we infest the trees, we then take that material additionally to be composted so that we're dealing with any residual risk because, as I said, we only need one bee to get out. We also restrict the movement of living plants with woody stems more than 2 centimetres because there's some literature to show that, you know, that's kind of the smaller size they'll generally go into. And you just need to be keeping material clean and everything. But if people aren't able to meet those requirements, we'd rather people are talking to us. So we say you can't meet it because it's a low risk material. Get in touch with us and we can work on a permit. And a lot of that permit is often an officer going out and looking at it and then moving it. So say you had some really lovely potted ficus in your garden and you're moving from Perth Metro down south. You might have an officer out just to make sure there's no shop holes in that material. So to give you an idea of trapping effort, we're trapping a few places outside of WF, outside of Perth Metro area. And you can see we're really only getting positives within that quarantine area, which is what we want. Even then, it's not really extended to the more northerly reaches, which we set it that far out based on some kind of very basic information of how far PSHB is known to spread. So that's been really good. You'll notice between this and it's a food-based lure. Two-year lacy. They actually think that lure scent, the cruciferol is actually produced by the fusarium when it's in a host as well, which is pretty. And when you think about it, you know, that's their food source. So if they can get to a tree, get the fusarium started and it's going, well, that's an attractant. Other beetles in the area to know that's a suitable host. We can move in there, you know. So that's how that lure works. And the host trees are very much in the similar kind of area as our positive traps. And so what we've got here are ones that are done by morphology. So especially the box elder maples we have not seen many, many of any other beetle infestants. So when we see a beetle that looks like PSHB, it's probably most likely to be it. Other hosts actually still have PCR done, because what I didn't cover was that Eulacic chronicitis until 2019 was part of the species complex. There's three other beetles in that complex and you can't distinguish them very readily morphologically. You need that molecular tool. So in a lot of responses you can move to morphological once you've got your system in place. But with this one it's just very challenging to do that. Actually the fusarium is one that you can somewhat do morphologically to create a classic fusarium sport. It actually makes more of a club shaped structure that they think has been evolutionary kind of happened so that the beetle can actually pick up I think of them as little fungal lollipops. You know, they're just going through which makes sense that you've got that convergent kind of thing happening where okay I can fix this up travel with them. So that's quite cool. I know there's a few fusarium sports looking up fusarium you will see might make you smile. So we can see here, you know, these are at top areas where we first found it down in a screen there tool but it wasn't long after that we found it elsewhere and but it's definitely still in more of those leafy, riverside suburbs which are areas where you get these mature trees that PSHP prefers. Our top hosts in WA so we keep a host list updated on the website regularly now. Our highest risk hosts are what we call reproductive hosts. So as I said 400 hosts and only about a quarter of those actually will be able to support reproduction. So for us our top ones more than 50% of our positives are box elder maples and then you come down to coral trees, your ravineas then we've got a couple of figs in there the Morton Bay and the poor Jackson fig and then some of those other bigger trees exotic trees like your poinsiana and your poplar and less so for the avocados. The good thing is we've not had it show up in any growing regions yet and even overseas an avocado in a backyard is often differently managed to an avocado in an orchid and in an orchid setting I actually find PSHP is not a very big problem as long as they're keeping their trees healthy. But just to give you an idea of what those systems are like on the posts, you get this beautiful, you're often this dark staining inside the Ace in the Gundo galleries and you can actually even just scrape the spores almost immediately out of those if you're looking for it. That amazing shotgun pattern on box elder and then on something like a coral tree you tend to get this really interesting it's more on the ridges that they tend to go in, you'll see them almost on a coral tree and we suspect that's to do with where maybe just softer material for them to borrow in in the first place at Poinciana we get more of like a little wet drop and then when the bar comes off you get more of a dry kind of dot happening underneath we've had some new global hosts and this was only in a highly invested site so there's some trees that we don't see because they're umbrella trees and you guys would be very familiar I hope with umbrella trees as well they're all over Queensland so this was a new global host so we're watching this one carefully and you're getting that incredible sap flow coming out of the tree in response to injury the black poplar which often shows this incredible kind of fungal culture almost it's like it's growing in that arc of that species so they're quite incredible so when we get a positive tree like that we because it's a stressful experience if you think we've had people who've got 30 year old trees as they planted when their son was born or when a really big life event happened working with trees and tree diseases it changes landscapes it changes property values all of these things so when we get a positive tree we assign a single case manager to that property so that person has a single point of contact with the department to work through them with what's going to happen with that tree we assess the trees and we make a treatment plan so as I said some trees will need to come out others may only need to trim off the invested material we issue what's called a pest control notice so we already have that quarantine area in play this adds additional things so nothing can come off that property because we know it's a higher risk so we want to manage that risk and then we do increased surveillance and tracking around that area as well because the other thing with this one is there's not much you can do once you've got an invested tree chemicals may be prolactically to try and protect a high value tree but you can't use it to necessarily treat or eradicate the beetle from a whole tree and we even had at least one property where they actually before we knew it had PSHV that property owner because they're often in wealthy areas that can afford it tented the whole tree kind of did a full gas thing and that tree still didn't survive so you know these are methods that we're able to use for some others just are not working for PSHV so the best way as I said is chipping so we actually remove the whole tree with a box elder you can't even leave the stump it will keep going we've even seen it going into you know how sometimes get larger roots coming out they'll even try larger roots at that species to try and keep going that's how much they like box elder makers so we stuck grind down on those species as well one of our best stories was actually from the US talking to our colleagues Disneyland had PSHV and they had treated all these trees they thought they had it under control and they couldn't figure out where all their bees were coming from and they had a lovely old stump that people used to sit on at their lunch everything and eventually made it there and it was just riddled with shop holes in Bora and so eventually they had to take that out and the cute thing there was because so many people liked sitting on it they basically made like a little stump based kind of it was some kind of metal poured thing that people could sit on to have at lunch so they still preserved the memory of that tree so it's a lot of hard work we do take the power and with that comes a lot of potential impacts so these are the things we're trying to avoid but the biggest impact is in loss of the urban and amenity trees you can imagine the solar radiation that then comes through you also a lot of local governments take big pushes which are good provide diversity and getting more trees in to help with keeping places beautiful as well as cooler in a warming environment fruit and tree crops there's not a lot of data to show that it has high impacts in fruit and tree crops as I said when they're well managed that's a thing with PSHB if you get a box elder they'll eat it no matter what's happening to it some other trees it's when they're more stressed and obviously in an urban setting that'll happen more often in a good managed orchard you can be kind of fighting off the beetle a little bit better but as with a lot of these things you don't know the impact for many many years so I worked on Myrtle rust back in the early days we knew we wouldn't see those impacts for 10, 15 years and I don't even think we knew that we would see as much species as we've seen with that particular pest until now so we're very cautious with this one that we hopefully don't push it to that stage and we want to get that population down and contain and ideally eradicate if we can so I said I'd talk about that urban interface just some key examples of the type of work and the sites we've had to manage for PSHB Mason Gardens in Del Quique which is a lovely garden surrounded by million dollar homes we had more than 150 invested trees at that site so there were about 30 established box elders they just kept churning out the numbers and we had a lot of juvenile trees that we're trying to manage now so we don't just have an ongoing kind of stuff and that was a lot of work too as you can see I'm wearing my emas we had to work a lot with the residents around do letter drops to let them know the work was happening because it's going to be two days of like chopping down trees which is quite disruptive and we also so we had what we call Bi-security Agriculture Management Act officers, BAM officers who actually is taking a photo to make sure those chips are getting to 2.5 centimetres so that we have a record that we have managed that site properly we also have sites like Pied Park if anyone follows Adam Sparks on any of these socials I know he's been putting up photos of Pied Park I don't know if he's put up any with PSHB in them yet but yeah, a large park in the metro region that we're dealing with there so it's very front of mind for people and the one that we're really concerned about at the moment is the Perth Zoo because you have a lot of trees in a small area it's not just the health of people and falling limbs you're talking about the health of animals and falling limbs and then what management can you put into place in a complex site like that so we're working really closely with some complex sites for that we encourage everyone to report your observations and even over here I couldn't help myself in Queens Park I could see a whole lot of little tip-dive back and I kept looking I'm not convinced it's PSHB you have a related beetle actually over here in Queensland which is more active on the Sunshine Coast and a little bit around Brisbane area called TSHB T-Shot Hold War but it's not as impactful probably as PSHB so if you do find symptoms or you know we always say if they know where a box elder is they're a great Sentinel for us we want to know where they are so we can track it and we offer a whole lot of training and information on our website now I'm into the what's your role let's bring it back to where we are no matter where we're in the country we have a role to play in biosecurity we were really lucky that that person from the public went this looks really weird and I'm going to report it because we know from that timeline that it's probably been there for at least two years and it took her until that point to be like this just isn't looking like anything I've seen before so for us on our side my boss Sonya needs to report to Gabrielle the Chief Plant Protection Officer we can 24 hours and it will think it's something new to Australia and we are encouraged to report both new pests as well as host and range extensions and that's where if you especially the work that you do if you want to see something on a weird host especially if it impacts the industry let us know because then we can start to shift our policies at a government level to make sure growers are protected because those new pests can impact exports and market access as well just reminding you to report before publishing lodging specimens as well as a good way to keep things current and if you're not sure if it has been reported in the state before or in Australia before reach out to your local department back we have a lot of what I call great literature that others just don't have access to we have within our team say WA we have an incredible database where over time because we do a lot of searching for different things we've kept kind of cliff notes on every species we've had to deal with and sometimes you might know more than we do as well so if you think you do we still don't mind being told we don't know something as well because we're working across so many pests and diseases and a reminder as well that there is the plant health Australia bulk training you can take as well which just goes over what your responsibilities are and how it all works in together for myself this is my last slide I have no idea how I'm doing for time working a response as a subject matter expert I mean the easiest way to say this is exhausting but it's also exhilarating you know it's super fast paced and interesting you have to give technical advice in context so sometimes you know we're so used to having so much time to look at every detail and tell you the best I can you make the best decision you can at the time and then you circle back around if you discover it's not quite right because that's okay as long as you're making the best decision you can at the time to manage it we do a lot of recording so you know I share my role with Louise Cressor and so it's important that we have standard operating procedures and work instructions to share and you keep track of key conversations and decisions that are made as well so that you're covered in that regard and as I said that structure provides support it's so nice to be like I need this I can just go to logs and say can you please do this I also have to be okay if not being in the field all the time and say okay can the ops people go out and survey this and the other thing you start to appreciate those surveillance stuff end up having way better eyes for it than I do and so you've hand off tasks to who is the best person to do it and so yeah from my point of view thanks to everyone especially the response team who are just incredible including the incident controller for a lot of it David Cousins the public information manager Marcus has put together a lot of these slides it's like Marcus I need some slides for this or that and he'll put them together which is incredible my fellow SME Louise as well as you know the diagnostics lab just run off their feet we've had a very busy year in WA amongst all of this I've also been SME on motor rust as well as blueberry rust by coming to the state so it's we're getting hit from all sides at all times so it's been really good and the teams have been great for that and everyone working with us that's me, thank you thank you thank you very much thank you for coming out of the range to deliver Mr