The NFFC’s Chris O’Connor and Stuart Burgess met with representatives from CSIRO to talk about a range of exciting research undertakings aimed at supporting fruit fly management.

The first meeting was with Dr Hazel Parry who will also be one of the presenters in the upcoming webinar on Area Wide Management (AWM). Hazel discussed her previous work with AWM of fruit fly (areawidemanagement.com.au) and noted the emergence of the chemically limited future as a driver for the need of approaches like AWM to better facilitate pest management outcomes. Hazel also discussed opportunities with digital modelling to better guide on-farm decision making and risk reduction.

The next meeting was with Dr Rieks van Klinken, Jane Muller and Dr Maryam Yazdani who work with the Phytosanitary Risk research group. Rieks and Jane discussed their work with systems-based approaches. This approach includes the validation of how different independent phytosanitary measures complement each other to achieve risk reduction outcomes.

Maryam shared her work with optical scanning-based approaches to better detect pest infestations in fresh fruit within packhouses as well as new approaches using x-rays technologies to detect fruit flies in fruit within boxes of fruit. This approach has particular merits at the border for both imports and exports.

These discussions offered significant potential in some of the new technologies being developed.

Want to know more? Take a look at some of the research efforts of the CSIRO team.