Overview

Biosecurity plays a vital role in protecting Australia’s natural environment, economy, and social amenities. However, as the world’s population grows, Australia’s biosecurity system is under increasing pressure from ecological, climatic, demographic, and behavioural changes. As a result, there is an urgent need for decision-support tools to more efficiently and effectively respond to future biosecurity threats. One of the challenges facing the biosecurity sector is limited access to modelling resources and expertise, and silos between organisations and jurisdictions that impede best practices. Consequently, models are often developed for a single purpose and rarely shared or reused. The solution to Australia’s modelling capability Set to launch in April 2023, Biosecurity Commons will deliver a cloud-based decision-support platform for modelling and analysing biosecurity risk and response. The two-year project (2021-2023) is a $1.8m joint initiative between the Australian and Queensland Government, the NCRIS funded Australian Research Data Centre (ARDC) and four other partners. The platform will address the limitations of Australia’s biosecurity modelling capability by offering researchers and decision-makers a suite of standard tools and resources to investigate specific biosecurity questions. These tools and resources include an intuitive web interface, high-capacity computing, scientific workflows, datasets, a secure workspace and cloud storage. For the first time, the platform will enable users from different organisations, sectors, and jurisdictions to share project work and collaborate on inputs, parameters and results necessary to improve research and accelerate decision-making outcomes for the future.