Biosecurity for sustainable animal farming in europe
SOA
35
Internal project
Action 2 - Leading Institute: UGent
Project summary
B-SAFE is a multidisciplinary project that aims to enhance external and internal biosecurity in European terrestrial and aquatic livestock production systems through comprehensive mapping, development of evidence-based protocols, deployment of digital tools, and stakeholder empowerment, with the ultimate goal of reducing the introduction and spread of infectious diseases, improving animal health and welfare, while limiting antimicrobial use.
Project objectives
- Mapping and categorizing of livestock farming systems in Europe by developing a standardized classification framework.
- Collecting and evaluating existing protocols for better biosecurity and create new ones for the underrepresented farming systems and missing sectors.
- Adapt and extend existing digital tools for data collection and the assessment of biosecurity risks at farm level to other species.
- Evaluating the impact of biosecurity on animal health, welfare and antimicrobial use by developing a system model of the interactions at farm level.
- Empowering animal health professionals for integrated farm health approaches via MOOCs, webinars, trainings and the development of an Academic Training Package.
- Demonstrating the effect of better biosecurity via experimental and observational studies.
Outcomes and impacts
- Two validated farm classification systems, one for terrestrial and one for aquatic species. Readiness for the field will be evaluated.
- A comprehensive overview of existing biosecurity assessment and implementation protocols, made publicly available.
- Development of new or revised, field-ready biosecurity protocols and tools for underrepresented systems.
- Expansion of the current risk assessment tools to include additional pathogens and/or species tested in the field.
- Achieve interoperability between the on-farm risk assessment tool and existing biosecurity quantification tools.
- Development of indicators to evaluate the impact of biosecurity at the farm level and case studies to test the conceptual model.
- Development of MOOCs, training sessions for animal health professionals and an Academic Training Package for students to enhance the biosecurity knowledge.