Sentinel nurseries to assess the phytosanitary risks from insect pests on importations of live plants

Ornamental plants represent a major pathway of invasion for alien pests worldwide. Commodity risk analyses are carried out to assess the risk posed by a new trade in a commodity, but they are restricted by our limited knowledge of the pests carried by traded plants. We used the sentinel nursery technique to identify insects attacking woody plants imported into Europe. We established two sentinel nurseries in China, with five traded Asian plants. These nurseries were monitored for two years to obtain lists of insects that can be expected on these commodities. These records were compared with those obtained from literature surveys, which are usually the sources of information available to pest risk assessors. At each site, 105 insect species and host associations were found on sentinel plants and 90% of these associations had not been found in a previous literature survey of insect pests of the five plants. Nearly 80% of these associations were not found in an a posteriori literature survey. An assessment classified 9%, 7% and 84% of the insect records as presenting a high, moderate and low likelihood of introduction, respectively. These results show the benefit of sentinel nurseries to identify potential infestation of plant commodity imports.