Development and testing of the media monitoring tool Med<scp>IS</scp>ys for early identification and reporting of existing and emerging plant health threats

Alomar, Òscar; Batlle, A.; Brunetti, Josep Maria; Garcı́a, Roberto; Gil, Rosa; Saltiveri, Toni Granollers i; Jiménez, Sara; Laviña, A.; Linge, Jens P.; Pautasso, Marco; Reverté, Carmen; Riudavets, Jordi; Rortais, Agnès; Stancanelli, Giuseppe; Volani, S.; Vos, Sybren

doi:10.1111/epp.12209

Cited by 15 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 27 publications

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“…From the work detailed in this report, and also described in a previous publication (Alomar et al, 2015), at the end of the project, all the objectives have been addressed. First of all, for Objective 1, a significant collection of news sources has been selected after an evaluation process that guarantees their timeliness so they can be monitored by MedISys.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Development and testing of the media monitoring tool MedISys for the monitoring, early identification and reporting of existing and emerging plant health threats

Alomar

Batlle

Brunetti

et al. 2016

EFS3

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MedISys is a media monitoring system initially intended for news items related to human health. The tool has how been extended by the Joint Research Centre, Universitat de Lleida and IRTA to also deal with plant health threats. This EFSA-funded project was based on a knowledge representation approach that generated an ontology, a formal representation of knowledge related to plant health threats. The ontology models plant pests and diseases, together with other concepts related with them: affected crops, hosts, vectors and symptoms. First of all, a collection of news sources related to plant health threats was collected to be monitored by MedISys. These sources included already known manually curated Web pages but also additional ones discovered by performing global Web searches using terms appearing in the ontology. Then, the news items coming from these sources were filtered using MedISys using a set of categories with keywords to identify those actually about plant health threats. Most of these categories focused on known threats and used terms associated with the 117 pests and diseases selected at the beginning of the project. Additionally, categories for unknown threats were also developed. In this case the categories included keywords that are usually used by experts to describe unknown threats and keywords related with symptoms expressions. All these MedISys categories combined provide mechanism to monitor plant health threats mentions in media, from newspapers to social media, ranging from those that explicitly mention a named threat (useful to monitor re-emerging threats or their spread) to those related to unknown ones (to monitor potential new threats). The project concluded with an evaluation of the e-mail alerts and reports generated by MedISys based on the previous categories. A survey and tests with real users were conducted and the results analysed to generate a set of recommendations and improvements to facilitate the use of MedISys as a plant health threats monitoring tool.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Development and testing of the media monitoring tool MedISys for the monitoring, early identification and reporting of existing and emerging plant health threats

Alomar

Batlle

Brunetti

et al. 2016

EFS3

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“…Approaches related to scientometrics can be used to monitor the attention of the media to forest and tree health [106], as well as public interest in various tree diseases, e.g., ash dieback [107], and, more generally, in forests ( Figure 6). Figure 6 suggests that whilst in India there has been no clear trend or seasonality of public interest in forests over the last years, in Japan there appears to have been a decline through time, whereas in the UK there has been marked seasonality, with public interest peaking during the summer.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Scientometrics of Forest Health and Tree Diseases: An Overview

Pautasso

2016

Forests

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Abstract:Maintaining forest health is a worldwide challenge due to emerging tree diseases, shifts in climate conditions and other global change stressors. Research on forest health is thus accumulating rapidly, but there has been little use of scientometric approaches in forest pathology and dendrology. Scientometrics is the quantitative study of trends in the scientific literature. As with all tools, scientometrics needs to be used carefully (e.g., by checking findings in multiple databases) and its results must be interpreted with caution. In this overview, we provide some examples of studies of patterns in the scientific literature related to forest health and tree pathogens. Whilst research on ash dieback has increased rapidly over the last years, papers mentioning the Waldsterben have become rare in the literature. As with human health and diseases, but in contrast to plant health and diseases, there are consistently more publications mentioning "tree health" than "tree disease," possibly a consequence of the often holistic nature of forest pathology. Scientometric tools can help balance research attention towards understudied emerging risks to forest trees, as well as identify temporal trends in public interest in forests and their health.

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“…Data on pathogens and hosts can be acquired using automated procedures applied to online data sources, such as the metadata uploaded with gene sequences, and the abstracts of biomedical papers. Media monitoring and social media are also a source of unstructured data (Galaz et al, 2010;Daume et al, 2014;Alomar et al, 2015;Daume, 2016). A pathogen/host database, such as the Enhanced Infectious Disease Database (EID2) can be used to address questions about the relationships between pathogens, hosts and their environment.…”

Section: 2mentioning

confidence: 99%

Drivers for emerging issues in animal and plant health

Richardson

Lockhart

Pongolini

et al. 2016

EFS2

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The history of agriculture includes many animal and plant disease events that have had major consequences for the sector, as well as for humans. At the same time, human activities beyond agriculture have often driven the emergence of diseases. The more that humans expand the footprint of the global population, encroach into natural habitats, alter these habitats to extract resources and intensify food production, as well as move animals, people and commodities along with the pathogens they carry, the greater the potential for pathogens and pests to spread and for infection to emerge or re-emerge. While essential to human well-being, producing food also plays a major role in disease dynamics. The risk of emergence of pests and pathogens has increased as a consequence of global changes in the way food is produced, moved and consumed. Climate change is likely to increase pressure on the availability of food and provide newly suitable conditions for invasive pests and pathogens. Human population displacements due to economic, political and humanitarian crises represent another set of potential drivers for emerging issues. The overlapping drivers of plant, animal and human disease emergence and environmental changes point towards the concept of 'One Health'. This paradigm underlines the urgent need to understand the influence of human behaviour and incorporate this understanding into our approach to emerging risks. For this, we face two major challenges. One is cultural; the second is methodological. We have to look at systems not under the narrow view of specific hazards but with a wider approach to system dynamics, and consider a broad spectrum of potential outcomes in terms of risk. In addition, we have to make sense of the vast amounts of data that are available in the modern age. This paper aims to help in preparing for the cultural and methodological shifts needed in our approach to emerging risks.

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Development and testing of the media monitoring tool MedISys for early identification and reporting of existing and emerging plant health threats

Cited by 15 publications

References 27 publications

Development and testing of the media monitoring tool MedISys for the monitoring, early identification and reporting of existing and emerging plant health threats

Development and testing of the media monitoring tool MedISys for the monitoring, early identification and reporting of existing and emerging plant health threats

Scientometrics of Forest Health and Tree Diseases: An Overview

Drivers for emerging issues in animal and plant health

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