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Tourists as Vectors of Potential Biosecurity Threats in Ireland
 

Researcher: Dr. Domhnall Melly
Supervisor: Dr James Hanrahan

Tourist vectoring of potential biosecurity threats represent substantial biosecurity risk for Ireland. Tourist’s inadvertently transporting infectious diseases and invasive alien species (IAS) can have serious implications for human and environmental health, with ramifications for economic and socio-cultural wellbeing within host communities. The findings of this research has informed the development of a tourism biosecurity planning and management model. Tourism planners and policymakers in Ireland can utilise this model to mitigate tourism biosecurity risk through a strategic pre-border to post-border stage approach. This could see essential tourist biosecurity communication, pathway management, and biosecurity vector mitigation measures alleviate the threat of future pandemics and biological invasions in Ireland.

Partially funded by: The ATU Masters Scholarship Fund 2019