Thematic mapping of biosecurity highlights divergent conceptual foundations in human, animal, plant and ecosystem health

Abstract

Effective biosecurity policies are essential to address several major sociological and environmental challenges facing humankind including existential pandemic risks, threats to food security, loss of ecosystem services and public resistance to pesticides and vaccines. Yet biosecurity is subject to multiple interpretations that include dealing with the threats from bioterrorism, managing laboratory biosafety to prevent the escape of pathogenic organisms, handling food and agricultural production systems to prevent disease introduction and addressing the threat of introduced organisms to flora, fauna and humans. The absence of a shared vision of what biosecurity encompasses means that decision-makers are often challenged to design appropriate biosecurity policies at national and global scales. The design of effective policy strategies requires an understanding of the methodological and conceptual barriers that constrain attempts to build an interdisciplinary approach to biosecurity. Here, the first thematic map of the biosecurity research landscape is undertaken to assess just how diverse the interpretation of biosecurity is amongst the global research community and the extent to which the articles published since 2000 represent a common conceptual foundation or are largely clustered within sectors. Co-citation, bibliographic coupling and co-word analyses highlighted that the field of biosecurity encompasses a wide range of domains from biochemistry through to political science, but the research supporting different sectors largely draws from a distinct literature base. While ecosystem and plant health were clustered together within the broad grouping of biological invasions, there was a clear separation from both human and animal health. Yet, there is considerable scope for the management of biological invasions to benefit from insights derived from social perspectives in human and animal health. Biosecurity remains divided by conceptual differences and specialised vocabularies that limit the effectiveness of biosecurity policies addressing biodiversity conservation, public health and food security. To overcome these constraints requires the building of a global biosecurity community that accepts a broader definition of biosecurity, avoids sectorial jargon and establishes mechanisms to cultivate interdisciplinarity through specialised collaborative centres, cross-sectorial research programmes and conceptually rich training programmes.