1.

This federal Cooperative Agreement award from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) under the Plant and Animal Disease, Pest Control, and Animal Care Program (CFDA 10.025) provides $112,092 to the Indiana Department of Natural Resources to expand public outreach and education efforts related to early detection and control of invasive forest pests.

The key activities include continuing to coordinate online resources on invasive species, creating educational videos, and building a volunteer network to support pest detection and reporting across Indiana. The intended outcomes are to increase public awareness, engagement, and reporting of pests of regulatory concern to help maintain the health of forests and landscape plants in Indiana and nationwide.

Purpose

Early detection of exotic forest pests is critical to maintain the health of forest and landscape plants. This project expands proactive legislative and inter-governmental outreach and systematic engagement of stakeholders and citizens to increase public understanding, acceptance and support of early detection, eradication or control of forest pests, particularly those of regulatory concern. 2.

Activities

This project aligns with goal 5: "conduct outreach and education to increase public understanding, acceptance and support of plant pest and disease eradication control efforts" developed at the secretary of agriculture's direction to aphis to implement section 7721 of the plant protection act. Indnr will a. Continue to coordinate the web and social media presence via their website and associated facebook, instagram, and twitter sites (reportinvasive.COM) with input from the indiana invasive species council (IISC) to make IT simpler for the public to access information about invasive species from multiple state agencies. B. Continue to create short educational videos about invasive species for industry and members of the public to assist the state in reporting existence of these pests in the environment. C. Create or build upon existing volunteer network programs for outreach and pest detection throughout the state via the bimonthly purdue landscape report blog > 4300 subscribers (purduelandscapereport.ORG), the idnr weekly review > 6500 subscribers 3. Deliverables and expected outcomes: an increase in the reported sightings of pests of regulatory concern, more and better facing public websites, more engagement by the public as a whole. 4. Intended beneficiary(IES): indiana and the whole of the USA 5. Subrecipient activities, if known or specified at the time of award: none at this time.