USDA APHIS PPQ is the lead federal agency providing safeguards against exotic plant pests threatening agriculture and natural systems. In response to exotic pest reports, requests for importation of exotic species and as part of its mandate to assure safe trade PPQ engages in the development of increasingly complex pest risk analyses. The objective of this multistage process (pest identification, risk assessment, management and communication) is to provide policy makers with scientific evidence necessary to valuate different response scenarios. The process of risk assessment is uniquely challenging. Some of the issues are: the need to support decision-making given suboptimal data; methodological issues (especially related to quantitative risk assessments and simulation modeling); mining for data in an interdisciplinary environment; regulatory vs. ecological languages; database development and maintenance. Quantitative and qualitative risk analyses are briefly reviewed and two cases are used to illustrate some of the challenges: importation of citrus fruit and accidental introduction of forest pest in solid wood packing.
Keywords: exotic species, citrus pests
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