UF Sentinel Gardens

This website is primarily a resource for Sentinel Garden management for our many generous collaborators across Asia, and also an inspiration for those who would like to explore the concept and collaborate with us.

The University of Florida (UF) Forestry Entomology lab approaches forest conservation from multiple angles. One of the greatest threats to the world’s forests, including those in North America, are invasive insects and fungi. Our Sentinel Gardens project aims to predict the threat of invasive tree pests before they arrive to the American continent. It is an international collaborative, supported by the US Forest Service International Programs.

Introduction

Benefits of the Project

The main challenges with regulating environmental pests such as wood borers is the large universe of unstudied offshore species: most of them are harmless, while a few cause megadisturbances. A further problem is that current pest risk assessment personnel in the US relies on outdated or unreliable literature and data management techniques.

Sentinel gardens do not estimate impact – they show it. For example, before the invasion of the redbay ambrosia beetle, nobody would have predicted that it would be such a threat to redbay and avocado. Sentinel gardens supply direct data on impact of the woodborers on the trees. Such direct evidence alleviates many assumptions that risk analysts have to make. In addition, sentinel gardens allow direct testing of pheromone lures to determine the US ability to detect the new threats. The lures are being used by the USDA Forest Service’s program Early Detection and Rapid Response (EDRR), and by the USDA Cooperative Agricultural Pest Survey.

This is the only project known to us that directly documents the impact of offshore woodborers on important American forest tree species. The new information will be available for many other agency uses, for example, the National Plant Pest Organization (NAPPO) Pest Alerts. APHIS uses published information on potential invasive borers in for their risk assessment using the Objective Prioritization for Exotic Pests (OPEP) model and for the prioritization of species for the CAPS target list. The USDA Forest Service uses new pest information for their EDRR target species list.

International Benefits

The deployment of sentinel gardens is emerging as an efficient approach to the risk assessment of exotic herbivores. A European Union team, led by INRA in Montpellier, France, has established a network of sentinel gardens in China a decade ago. These have produced more than 105 discoveries of potential pests new to Europe (reviewed in Kenis et al. 2018). The results led to the strengthening of relationships between the researchers and institutions in EU and China. In November 2019, the parties have signed an agreement to expand the collaboration and establish a formal intergovernmental laboratory.

While the Europe-China collaboration is ahead of any similar American effort, we are hoping to collaborate with the inolved parties, and also implement several innovations, including a robust data management, a stressed-tree treatment, and the sourcing of larger trees through the nursery trade.

Benefits to Trade

Pre-invasion screening of overseas pests is not a barrier to trade. To the contrary: knowing which pests are harmful and which are harmless facilitates international trade. It is because the approach demonstrates which offshore woodborers are low priority. The Chinese counterparts are also fully supportive of the project, as evidenced by co-authored publications (e.g., Gao et al., 2017).

Objectives

In this study the aim was to develop a data collection, validation, and storage framework. We set about this with the following objectives:

Establish and maintain sentinel gardens of American trees in several natural localities in China and South Korea, spanning the tropical, subtropical and temperate regions that match the USA latitudinal range.
Establish and maintain a reciprocal garden of Asian trees in Florida.
Over 4 years, trees will be monitored for damage by wood borers attracted to living, healthy, and stressed trees.
For the high priority species, key risk factors are collected.
Establish a data management framework with the aim of securely and easily capturing, storing and sharing data in real time.

Videos

Recording Tree Health

Insect Collection

Taking Clearer Photos

Methods & Materials

Sentinel Garden Management

A sentinel garden is a set of trees planted overseas to detect non-native pests; for example, American trees planted in China. The concept is increasingly used for new pest detection by several international research and regulatory bodies. Our team and the USDA Forest Service International Programs manage gardens in China and South Korea through agreements with the land managers or owners.

Gardens have been established in:

- Yunnan Province, Mengla, near the XTBG garden.
  XTBG is the Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
  Climate: subtropical to tropical. Land near a protected area has been secured and will be funded by FS-IP; access and rent is facilitated through the coordinating agency (Minhou Pest Control).
  Contact person: Yiyi Dong, XTBG Botanical Garden.

- Fujian Province, Shuyang Village.
  Climate: subtropical.
  Contact person: Yongying Ruan, PhD., Shenzhen Polytechnic, Shenzhen, Guangdong.

- Shandong Province, Taian.
  Climate: temperate.
  Contact person: Yingchao Ji, PhD, Shandong Agricultural University, Department of Forest Protection.

- Seoul National University campus, Seoul, S. Korea.
  Climate: temperate to cold.
  Contact person: Professor Seunghwan Lee, PhD., and Mr. Jinbae Seung, SNU
- Gangwon-Do cottage, S. Korea.
  Climate: temperate to cold.
  Contact person: Professor Seunghwan Lee, PhD., and Mr. Jinbae Seung, SNU

Data Management with a Smartphone App

Reports on potential pests from sentinel gardens are important and expensive, and therefore deserve the most robust collection, management and storage. Data from our sentinel gardens are collected through mobile devices. First, trees are planted and immediately associated with a barcode. This barcode is used to initialize the tree into the database through a tree initialization form, and stored in the Google cloud. Thereafter, trees can be surveyed repeatedly by recording data to the associated tree barcode in the database. As data is recorded into the cloud database, statistical analysis may proceed on the live data. The statistical analytics alongside the raw data are accessible to all our collaborators and stakeholders in a secure way.

For details about installing and running the app on your phone, please refer to the detailed guidelines here: https://www.bbmycobiome.org/wiki/index.php/Sentinel_garden_management_app

Tree Initialization Form

The tree initialization form captures data such as tree species, GPS coordinates, and an image of the tree. This is captured alongside other metadata about the device that performed the initialization.

Tree Survey Form

The tree survey form records data on tree health, including a global vitality score and detailed scores for affected parts, with visual proof. It also captures pest observations, with suspected classifications, images, and a unique observation ID for captured specimens.

Results

Year 1

The Project kicked off at the start of 2021 and is projected to end at the end of 2025. At one year in all the major sentinel gardens have been planted with more being established in other parts of Asia. The data management platform has been actively used to capture, store and share data. We have already been able to monitor and track potentially invasive tree pests through the live data feed and statistical analysis.

Live Data Feed

Through the live feed of data that we receive on the Device Magic platform we are able to monitor when, where, how and by whom data is collected. We can manage data collection by sending collection reminders when necessary.

Threat Detection

We are able to accurately identify the recorded insects and make this ability available to all our collaborators, by leveraging the skills available in the UF Forest Entomology Lab and by using the macro photography available in today’s smart phones. Further, through statistical analysis of anomaly and outlier detection, we are able to prioritize the most important cases and investigate further the potential threats before they mature into real threats.

Acknowledgments

We would like to express our appreciation to the United States Department of Agriculture – Forest Service – International Programs (USDA FS IP) for their support for this project.

A special thanks to all our collaborators at the Chinese Academy of Sciences – XTBG, the Shandong Agricultural University, the Fujian Agricultural and Forestry University, for the work they have put in to manage and monitor their sentinel gardens.

We are very grateful to colleagues at the Insect Systematics Laboratory, Seoul National University, who manage the sentinel gardens in South Korea.

We are also grateful for the help Device Magic has given us throughout the project. Their responses were always quick and concise. Without the quickly scalable international reach of Device Magic’s platform the data capturing application would not have been deployable within such a short timeframe.

Lastly, but not least this project owes its success to Yiyi Dong for connecting all the different components of the project in the United States and China overcoming the hurdles of travelling during the COVID-19 pandemic.