PaDIL – Pest and Disease Image Library

High-quality colour diagnostic images and information on pests and diseases. PaDIL helps protect against invasive threats to Australia's plant health.1

Description

PaDIL – Pest and Disease Image Library, combines leading edge technology in light microscopy, digital imaging and image manipulation. Utilising an innovative, non-molecular mechanism, it provides ‘virtual specimens’ of a type only previously possible using low-power scanning-electron microscopy.2

• A series of images is captured, each providing an in-focus image of part of the photographed organism.
• Each series of images is then combined to create a single new image, built from only the in-focus pixels from each individual image.
• Specimens are shown in true-life colour.
• Destructive preparation of specimens is not required.
• Diagnostic images show the user the best orientation to view the specimen.
• Results allow a user with a microscope to focus on different parts of the viewed organism, simultaneously comparing what they see against a single PaDIL image.
• All images are copyright free for non-commercial purposes.

PaDIL is a Commonwealth Government initiative, developed and built by Museum Victoria's Online Publishing Team, with support provided by DAFF (Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry) and PHA (Plant Health Australia), a non-profit public company.4

Function

• Visualisation tools
  • Images
• Taxonomy
  • Identification tools
• User interface
  • Personal use
  • Visual presentation

Why use this tool?

Quarantine and plant health are critical to the economic, social and environmental well-being of Australia:5

• Australia’s existing taxonomic expertise is declining and aging.
• From a plant health and quarantine perspective, this brings an increasing risk that incursions will go unrecognised or be diagnosed too late to be contained.

PaDIL helps alleviate the loss of real-world expertise through the generation of ‘virtual’ expertise:6

• Virtual collections of high quality digital images, illustrated diagnostic keys and on-line tutorials overcome the expense of maintaining centralised technical reference collections.
• Illustrations are focussed on key diagnostic features.
• Diagnostic material is available to a much larger group of users.
• Taxonomic expertise is unnecessary, particularly where diagnosis is aimed at a limited group of target species (i.e. pest species on a quarantine target list).

Who will use this tool?

• Data users
  • Expert
  • Interest groups
  • General public
• Special skills not required

How will the tool be used?

• Online database of images
• Web Browser
• Is it used on the desktop or online?
• User input required
• Not a batch job

Where in the data chain could this tool be used?

• User’s machine

When could this tool be used?

• At the time of a user request

Availability

• PaDIL: http://www.padil.gov.au
• Help: http://www.padil.gov.au/helpMain.aspx
• Cost: free
• Restrictions: Saving and printing acceptable for research, education, and personal use. Material is not available to be sold or re-sold without permission.
• Copyright: Owned by authors

Comments

Impressive high quality images with the ability to pan and zoom.