About us
The current biosecurity landscape
A changing climate and globalisation have dramatically increased Australia’s exposure to new pests and diseases that can have devastating economic, environmental and social impacts. As a result, there is an urgent need for decision-support tools to more efficiently and effectively respond to growing biosecurity threats.
One of the challenges facing the biosecurity sector is limited access to modelling resources and expertise. This creates organisational silos of expertise that impede best practices. Consequently, models are often developed for a single purpose with limited collaboration and are rarely shared, reused or improved upon.
The solution to Australia’s modelling capability
Biosecurity Commons is a cloud-based, decision-support platform for modelling and analysing biosecurity risk and response. It is a joint initiative between the Australian and Queensland governments, the NCRIS funded Australian Research Data Centre (ARDC) and four other partners.
The platform addresses 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 include trusted datasets, repeatable scientific workflows, a secure workspace, and cloud storage, all presented with an intuitive point-and-click web interface.
For the first time, the platform enables users from different organisations, sectors, and jurisdictions to share project work and collaborate on inputs, parameters and results to improve research and accelerate decision-making outcomes.
Cutting-edge analytics and research infrastructure
The Biosecurity Commons project provides cutting-edge analytics while leveraging national research infrastructure and expertise.
Seven workflows are available on the platform which have been peer-reviewed by a group of expert scientists and modellers from government, industry and research to ensure they represent the needs of the biosecurity community.
The platform allows users to quickly and easily run workflows multiple times to investigate various scenarios using different datasets, methods and parameters. They can also be stored, shared and used to collaborate with other organisations or jurisdictions trying to solve similar biosecurity challenges.
Looking to the future
The Biosecurity Commons team is working closely with the government, researchers and industry to ensure the platform continually evolves to meet the needs of its users. The team is also actively exploring opportunities for collaboration to identify funding streams to ensure the its long-term sustainability.
The Biosecurity Commons team welcomes the opportunity to work with organisations interested in collaborating on platform architecture, infrastructure, workflows, datasets, resources and more. Reach out to us via the contact us page to learn more.
Our mission
To empower decision-makers and researchers with decision-support tools for modelling and analysing biosecurity risk and response.
Our vision
To build an environment where decision-makers and researchers can collaborate on the modelling and analytics required to respond efficiently to biosecurity threats.
Our partners
Biosecurity Commons is a joint initiative of the Australian and Queensland Government, the NCRIS-funded Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC) and four other organisations.
- Biosecurity Commons received investment (https://doi.org/10.3565/5rgj-z585) from the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC). The ARDC is enabled by the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS).
