Aquatic Animal Health Subprogram: the Neptune Project- a comprehensive database of Australian aquatic animal pathogens and diseases

Funded Activity Summary

The Neptune project was conceived to add significant value to existing investments in aquatic animal health by building a platform for capturing and sharing information on aquatic animal pathogens and diseases. The project was initially funded through NCRIS; however, that funding has now expired and additional work is required to ensure Neptune fully addresses the needs that it was intended to address. Those needs include:

1. Ensuring the outputs of Australia’s aquatic animal disease professionals are disseminated to achieve greatest effect.
2. Effectively connecting aquatic animal health professionals from government, universities, museums, diagnostic laboratories and industry.
3. Addressing geographic separation of professionals by enabling remote collaboration within the sector and with other sectors.
4. Enable aquatic animal health biosecurity investments to impact fully by making data and resource outputs more broadly accessible.
5. Improving availability of high quality information and resources for many of Australia’s most important aquatic animal diseases.
6. Providing access to readily available and aggregated distribution data through a platform capable of hosting and displaying such information.
7. Ensuring access to technology that can better capture and share physical specimens such as histological slides. These remain a key tool for aquatic animal pathologists and researchers but are not easily duplicated or shared.
8. There are currently insufficient opportunities for aquatic animal health training in Australia. Neptune will provide synergies for other FRDC training investments such as the Aquatic Animal Health Training Scheme.
9. There are currently no integrated resources to store and provide access to training material for aquatic animal health professionals.
10. Many of Australia’s aquatic animal health pathologists have retired recently or are due to retire in the near future. There is a need to ensure the data and collections of these aquatic animal health professionals are captured and shared more broadly.

Objectives:
1. To improve the user interface of Neptune to allow more streamlined searches, better data access and more efficient data entry.
2. Complete the transformation of data from the Australian Aquatic Animal Pathogen and Disease Database (AAAPD) (FRDC project 2003/646) so that all available peer-reviewed and official reports of aquatic animal pathogens and diseases in the AAAPD are included in Neptune
3. Establish a digital microscopy capability within the Neptune Community Space
4. Establish a digital microscopy slide image library within the Neptune Community Space that incorporates examples of significant endemic aquatic animal diseases and links them with relevant database case entries
5. Establish a digital microscopy slide image library for significant exotic aquatic animal diseases that is clearly differentiated from other data entries and resources for endemic diseases
6. Implement a program of activities that engages the user community in the Neptune facility and includes monthly webinars on research project progress or special issues, online workshops that use the digital microscopy functionality (e.g. histopathology, exotic disease awareness), and regular user training (as required) on the use of Neptune capabilities
7. Develop plans for the development of user generated mapping functionality
8. Explore options that could provide a more cost-effective hosting environment for Neptune

Funded Activity Details

Start Date: 01-03-2013

End Date: 21-02-2014

Funding Scheme: Funding Scheme not available

Funding Amount: $144,822.33

Funder: Fisheries Research and Development Corporation

Research Topics

ANZSRC Field of Research (FoR)

There are no FoR codes available for this funding activity

ANZSRC Socio-Economic Objective (SEO)

There are no SEO codes available for this funding activity

Other Keywords

Animal Health | App | Biosecurity | Community | Data | Disease | Laboratory Procedures | Policy | Software

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