The role of database in phytosanitary is becoming more and more important. Various types of quarantine databases have been established and applied in phytosanitary.EPPO has established a phytosanitary PQ database. This database includes host range, geographical distribution and other exhaustive catalogs of all A1 and A2 lists of pests in EPPO. It also includes details of the extent of occurrence of each pest in a country such as greenhouse and field occurrence, date of introduction and information on eradication.EPPO has also developed a database of phytosanitary information sheets for the European Union (EU) in cooperation with CABI, with the aim of basing EU phytosanitary on harmonized quarantine provisions. The information sheets use standardized headings for pests (including scientific name, synonym, taxonomic status, common name, description of nomenclature and classification), host, geographic distribution, biology, detection and identification, modes of transmission and dispersal, significance of the pest (including economic impact, control and quarantine risks), and phytosanitary measures and references. Not only is the database now available electronically, but a reference book on European Quarantine Pests has also been published.
The Global Quarantine Information System (GQIS) developed by FAO is a similar quarantine database. The database not only provides data similar to those mentioned above, but also provides summaries of phytosanitary regulations, lists of quarantine pests, and treatment methods of relevant national and regional plant protection organizations. In addition, FAO/IBPGR's Technical Guidelines for Safe Transportation of Germplasm Resources, USDA's Phytosanitary Interception Records Database reflecting information on quarantine interception, and PLANTI's Plant Information Database (PLANT1NFO) are professional databases related to phytosanitary. In addition, the National Agricultural Pathogen Information System (NAPIS) and the World Plant Pathogen Database (WPPD) established by USDA-APHIS and USDA-ARS, and the Pest and Disease Information Database (PDID) established by AQIS of Australia are also important databases in quarantine, and the CD-ROM of the Global Plant Protection Handbook (CPC) was released in 1998 by CABI for use by all plant inspection units. The CD-ROM provides a wealth of biological data, information and photographs of pests.
In China, the inspection and quarantine departments have also developed a database of animal and plant inspection and quarantine literature. The database contains the Ministry of Agriculture in 1996 announced the 97 kinds of imported animals, one or two types of infectious diseases, parasitic diseases and 84 kinds (types) of imported plants quarantine for risky pests of literature, including since 1971 to date, nearly 110,000 about the animal epidemic and plant pests, and can query the relevant host information, is the animal and plant inspection and quarantine departments to carry out scientific research to carry out a powerful literature retrieval tool.
In addition to the above databases, there are other types of factual databases, including BayerAG's database of pest names and synonyms, databases on control methods, especially genetic resistance and pesticide information (Russell, 1991; Kidd, 1991), and databases on specimens and cultures (Allsop et al. 1989), etc. have greatly facilitated PRA work. Of particular note is the fact that because of the changing nomenclature of organisms, their imperfect continuity, and the sheer number of organisms, biological name databases are of particular importance in providing access to additional information.The CABI International Center for Agricultural Biology indexing library, CABIThesaurus, for example, has built up a thesaurus of 75,000 terms related to agriculture and related disciplines, and 1/10th of those terms are insect names. In its Arthropod Names Index (ANI), there are about 100,000 names and synonyms of insects and other arthropods, and these are frequently encountered in the literature on plant protection. Other valuable sources of information are the Directory of Major Arthropods and Weeds in Southeast Asian Agriculture compiled by the Australian Center for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR) and the Directory of Important Pests of Major Crops in the Asia-Pacific Region compiled by FAO (1993). Modern information technology also facilitates the understanding of national quarantine regulations, such as the JUSTIS-CELEX database system established by the European Union. The system includes all the laws and regulations promulgated since the establishment of the European Union in 1952, such as trade, finance, customs and animal and plant inspection and quarantine regulations. In China, the Sino-Foreign Legal Information System has also been established, and these regulatory databases will provide powerful evidence for quarantine enforcement and decision-making.
As molecular genetics is more and more widely used in plant protection, especially in the classification and identification of pests, its rapidly expanding nucleic acid protein sequence databases can provide molecular level information on pests for PRA work. The nucleic acid protein sequence databases that have been established so far include the European Molecular Biology Laboratory Nucleic Acid Sequence Database EMBI (1988), Genbank (1992), the Ribosomal Database Project RAP in the United States (1993), and the DNA Database of Japan DDBJ (DNADataBaseofJapan). DNADataBaseofJapan) and the gene sequence database GS-DB, among others. It can be expected that these databases will play an increasingly important role in the classification and identification of pests such as viruses, virus-like organisms, phytoplasma and bacteria, especially in the identification of variation at the infraspecies level, which may be of great significance for quarantine decision-making. For example, the quarantine pest of banana bacterial wilt (Ralstomasolanacearum) in China is a subspecies of this pathogen.2