QuantiPest is one of a suite of platforms accessible through ENDURE’s Virtual Laboratory and has been created by INRA’s (French National Institute for Agricultural Research) IPM network following feedback from several ENDURE partners across Europe.

It has been created to bring together the knowledge needed for characterisation of pest injuries and populations, as this is at the heart of being able to conduct field experimentations. Better knowledge about pest injuries and populations improves the ability of researchers to assess the efficacy of diverse control methods and Integrated Pest Management strategies. Furthermore, developing this knowledge means researchers can more accurately perform tasks such as effective assessments of farmers’ fields in order to characterise the main pest problems within a given region.

QuantiPest is aiming to help design protocols to characterise pest injuries or pest populations by providing the most relevant information sources, methods and protocols. It is deliberately not aiming to list all available protocols used to characterise pest populations and injuries at the field level, but rather to provide references, methods and tools to help develop protocols adapted to specific objectives.

By making it easier to share methods and protocols between ENDURE members, the platform is designed to facilitate the sharing of data and the implementation of an experimental network across the partners’ various field facilities listed in the Virtual Laboratory. The platform is mainly targeted at technicians and researchers and can be used to include information on all the crops and pests studied by ENDURE partners.

Three major areas

Knowledge
	Knowledge consists of educational pages presenting information on: Pest population and pest injury identification Pest and pest injury quantification Tools and methods for sampling Users can navigate through these pages using a tree structure to find answers to their questions.
Documentary management
	The documentary management section allows users to search by keywords for relevant documents in the document database.
	The platform is also interactive, allowing users to help feed the platform and add suggestions or comments to topic pages.
Training programs
	The training programs section consists of multiple-choice questions based on photographs, and makes it easy to design computer-aided training programs using the platform.

For more information:

• Visit the QuantiPest platform
• Download the poster: QuantiPest poster