Abstract: Phylogenetic distance is a key measure used to develop host test lists that will delimit the fundamental and realised host range of candidate biocontrol agents. Plant pathogens and insects, even those with broad host ranges, exhibit some degree of phylogenetic conservatism in their host plant associations. Thorough testing is crucial to minimise the risk of off-target damage by biocontrol agents to native and economically important plant species. To facilitate this, host test lists need to be developed from an understanding of evolutionary relationships, usually visualised as a phylogenetic tree generated from genetic data, together with plant functional traits and geospatial information. Currently, the process of obtaining a host test list is not standardised, and the manual steps are time-consuming and challenging. We have developed a user-friendly visualisation tool called PhyloControl to aid biocontrol researchers in their decision-making during host test list development. PhyloControl integrates taxonomic data, molecular data, spatial data, and plant traits in an intuitive interface, empowering biocontrol practitioners to summarise and analyse data efficiently. The interface will streamline the development of biocontrol host tests lists to support risk analysis and decision making in classical weed biological control.

Biography: Dr. Stephanie Chen is a CSIRO Postdoctoral Fellow based at the Australian National Herbarium working on digitally transforming risk analysis in biocontrol. Prior to this, she was a Scientific Officer Biodiversity Research at the Botanic Gardens of Sydney working on plant conservation genomics projects. Stephanie holds a Bachelor of Science (Honours) from the University of Sydney and obtained her PhD from the University of New South Wales. Her primary research interests focus on the development and optimisation of genomic resources and decision support tools for plants.