Rethinking EFSA pest risk assessment from the SEED: the next generation tools for climate suitability analysis

The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) conducts plant pest risk assessment (PRA) under the mandate of the European Commission, the European Parliament, and the Member States. The analysis of pest climate suitability in the EU is a key element of PRA, and it is based on multiple layers of analysis, spanning from the evaluation of the presence of suitable hosts in the area under assessment to the analysis of climate suitability for the pest. We present the ongoing EFSA SEED project (Spatially Explicit Environmental Data) for climate suitability analysis to support EFSA staff, experts and contractors. 
The SEED project will release operational cloud-based, user-friendly, digital services to support climate suitability analysis. It will release tools to develop climate suitability maps based on agro-climatic indicators, and on process-based and species distribution models.
Key objectives of the project are improving analysis capability, quality and speed of assessments, ensuring traceability and reproducibility of results, and removing the technical barriers inherent the use of geospatial data (GIS software and/or coding). The combination of state-of-art cloud technologies and science-based products are being developed in the EFSA cloud environment leveraging on the Databricks platform to allow and enhance “citizen development”, hence fostering collaboration with the external scientific experts supporting EFSA. The tools are under development and are aimed to support EFSA scientists, experts, working groups on the development of the PRAs, but will also be freely available to external institutions, and experts working with maps based on agrometeorological indicators.