What is needed to improve the selection, testing and evaluation of weed biological control agents: Workshop synthesis and recommendations

This biological control workshop, organised by the Co-operative Research Centre (CRC) for Australian Weed Management, included sessions on agent selection, host-specificity testing, and different aspects of evaluating weed biological control programs. A key purpose of this workshop was to enable scientists involved in weed biological control from northern and southern Australia to meet and discuss some of the critical issues of their discipline. This paper summarises the outcomes of the workshop discussions, which occurred following the presentation of a series of position papers, published in these proceedings, on each of the three afore mentioned aspects of biological control. Agent selection, while critical to project success, remains one of the least science-based activities in biological control. A number of techniques are now available to improve the science behind agent selection, including understanding the population dynamics and genetic structure of target and agent species and using molecular techniques and climate models for better target-agent matching. Recent scientific developments now allow for a complete reappraisal of the reasoning and process behind accepted host specificity testing procedure. A need was identified to develop new protocols for such testing, together with regulators, built around these modern scientific concepts. Impact evaluation, at a local and regional scale, can be helped by ecological models which can themselves provide the basis of economic models that predict or demonstrate the net benefits of weed biological control. Finally, this paper highlights key recommendations for future research that emerged from workshop discussions.