The scorecard of a decade of Forest Health Surveillance in Australia Tim Wardlaw 1 , Angus Carnegie 2 and Simon Lawson 3 1. Forestry Tasmania, 79 Melville Street Hobart 7000, Tasmania 2. Forests NSW, 423 Pennant Hills Road, Pennant Hills 2120, New South Wales 3. Queensland Department of Primary Industries and Fisheries, 80 Meiers Road, Indooroopilly 4068, Queensland. Extended abstract There is a general appreciation in most countries that have well-developed forestry industries, of the threats to wood production posed by outbreaks of pests and pathogens. Forest health surveillance (FHS), the formal inspection of planted and natural forests by trained observers for the purpose of detecting damage, is used as a tool for the early detection of developing pests and disease problems in several countries including the United States, Canada and New Zealand. FHS, based closely on the New Zealand system, was introduced into Australia in 1996-97 by the State forest services in New South Wales, Queensland and Tasmania. Until then the general detection of pest and disease problems in Australian forests relied on infrequent visits by a small number of forest pathologists and entomologists supported by ad hoc detection’s by forest workers during visits to the forests for routine operations. The Sirex outbreak in the Green Triangle in 1986-7, which resulted in the death of several million trees, was a sobering reminder of the consequences of not detecting and managing pest and disease problems early. Fear of repeats of the 1986-7 Sirex outbreak was a major argument used in persuading forest managers to establish FHS in those three Australian states. To celebrate the 10th anniversary of the introduction of FHS, Research Working Group 7 (Forest Health) held a workshop in November 2006 to review the current status of FHS in Australia. It is planned for the full proceedings of this workshop to be published in a special issue of Australian Forestry. In the meantime, this presentation provides a synthesis of the presentations made by each State representative at that workshop. Terminology was standardised to enable comparison of forest health surveillance and monitoring activities that were described by the presenters from each of the states. Four types of activity were recognised according to the definitions given in Table 1. NSW, Queensland and Tasmania remain the only states to conduct FHS (Table 2) and with the exception of Tasmania, FHS coverage is restricted to State forest. Sirex monitoring done in South Australia is close to meeting the definition of FHS because it does have an element of general damage detection and it does entail the inspection of the entire target area. Victoria and Western Australia have each introduce plot-based programs for monitoring forest health and condition. Their general objective is to detect changes in condition although in Victoria, assessments of above-threshold levels of damage within a subset of plots may trigger pest-population surveys linked to control decisions (for Dothistroma needle blight). Western Australia stands out in the effort it devotes to surveillance and monitoring activities in native forests. This effort befits the high value for conservation of biodiversity in those forests and the long history in active management of threats to that biodiversity, particularly the threat posed by Phytophthora cinnamomi. Similarly, the protection of important biodiversity refuges in plantation nodes was one of the reasons for expanding FHS in Tasmania to include wildlife habitat strips. Elsewhere surveillance and monitoring of health problems in native forests receives scant attention. This is not surprising given the immense areas involved and the low likelihood of any management action being taken in response to detecting health problems. The prospect of being able to cheaply monitor the health and condition of extensive areas of native forests by satellite remote sensing in the future is promising. There has been steady progress in