Professor Taylor:

Good morning or good afternoon where everyone is living and listening to this seminar which is EPA's environmental science series seminar which is part of Victoria's nature festival.

Welcome to you all. Today we'll be launching an exciting new citizens science program for EPA called GardenSafe and we're joined by special guest speakers, Professor Martin from New Zealand and Ms Kara Fry from EPA Victoria.

My name is Professor Mark Patrick Taylor. I'm the Chief Environmental Scientist at the EPA and today I will be hosting the session and the webinar. I would like to begin by acknowledging Aboriginal people as the first peoples and traditional custodians on the land and water on which we live. We pay respects to Aboriginal people...I'm speaking from Darug country.

So a few notes on this livestream event. As always, please be patient with technical difficulties because we're likely to experience some. The structure of today's event will feature an introduction and presentation by myself followed by a presentation by Dr Martin, followed by a presentation by Ms Kara Fry and then we'll finish that with a panel Q&A and have a summary conclusion.

The event is recorded live. If you need to leave early or miss parts of the session you can watch it later via the EPA website. We'll provide time at the end for a Q&A. We ask that you type your questions in the question box at the bottom of the screen which will become active as the session moves on a little bit towards the end of the talks so we don't get inundated with too many questions that we can't answer and process in sufficient time.

We will get to as many questions as we can, however for those that we don't have time to answer during the session you can submit your questions to us at contact@epa.vic.gov.au. So what we're here for today, well we're here to talk about the value and power for citizen science and to launch EPA's citizen science program GardenSafe.

GardenSafe is part of a global initiative which is designed to help people better understand what makes their backyard soil or contaminants or risk or better practices they can take to more enjoy their backyard. Indeed one of the mottos we have for people who need to understand their garden soil is to carry on...about the programs that have inspired the development of GardenSafe.

What that set out to achieve and results that they have shown and how they have empowered communities and people across the globe. We'll also learn about the differences in this new Victorian EPA GardenSafe program, the benefits of being involved and how to sign up. At the end of the session we'll invite you to register online for GardenSafe and to send in your soil samples for our scientists to test. We will test the soil for common contaminants. In return you'll receive a personalised report outlining what's in your soil and how to interpret the results.

You'll also be able to view your anonymous results and see how they compare with other locations and other participants in the program. Speaking to these topics in more detail will be myself as the founder of... safe at Macquarie University and now EPA's chief environmental scientist, Dr Adam Martin who is a... for those that know that in New Zealand which is a similar program to which we are running here GardenSafe and VegeSafe. And Kara Fry who is one of our citizen scientists at EPA Victoria.

On to the first presentation which I have the pleasure of delivering, can we bring that up on the screen, that would be great.

How do we transfer the slides?  There we go.

That's terrific.

Can we take off my image on the slide, please, because I can see myself and it's not the full slide.

Brilliant. Thank you so much.

What I'm going to talk about today are some of the citizen science programs I've been involved in in my previous career as a professor at the University of Sydney and the value that they've brought and why we've done them and what sort of outcomes they've produced from a scientific perspective.

So starting off I think it's important to give context to what we do at EPA and why we do it. Well, we are the authority for environmental matters in Victoria. We also are significantly involved in regulation but we also do a large amount of work in science and providing information and guidance in relation to contamination, air pollution and also water pollution.

We use regulation education science and policy to assist the community and to make better decisions. The EPA or the authority works with all Victorians and the purpose of this work is to prevent and reduce harmful effects of pollution and waste. We have a view and our motto is that the environment is everybody's business and the work that we do and the efforts that we undertake are to aim to protect and reduce and to mitigate and eliminate where possible any adverse effects associated with pollution and waste.

So the EPA received a new Act in 2017. That Act really shifted the way we operate. The focus is about prevention rather than rehabilitation. So it's about mitigating and minimising any of those risks before they eventuate. We've made community central to preventing harm and that fits nicely with the GardenSafe program because we're providing knowledge and information to enable the community, not only to understand any potential risks but also to address them themselves.

The change in our organisation was designed to help us deliver against emerging challenges as we face in the 21st century and the EPA uses data as part of this decision-making. It's front and foremost the EPA's science of which I am the executive director of is interdigitated intimately with every facet of EPA policy and regulation executive services about supporting and advancing the decisions that we make with the best available science using the current state of knowledge.

So what is citizen science?  Many of you who listen to this will probably be aware of it but it could be simply summarised as a practice of public participation and collaboration in scientific research to increase scientific knowledge. Essentially the purpose is really to allow participants to share and contribute data. That's the underlying premise of citizen science. It's really engagement with the public, scientists work with the community to collect and harness data to gather information. It could be on soils. It could be on plants. It could be on birds. It could be on fish. It could be on insects.

That data gets sent back to the scientists who then... they may map it, assess it and evaluate it and report back to the participants and present that data in a unified format for the wider public to see and understand. One of the primary drivers of citizen science is you, the public. Curious communities. Science is everywhere. As we have seen join the COVID pandemic the value of science and people's understanding and need to access science and...has increased markedly in the 21st century because I see this as the centre of the environment for climate change and the.... Of what that is doing to our climate and to the liveability of the places that we locate. Of course, in response to the - which has largely been driven by the community, driven by the public.

There have been various forms of government strategies that have responded to the community's clear need and desire for science and involving themselves in science in a deep, meaningful and authentic way. I've listed a range of them on this particular slide. We have state citizen science strategies report, we've got state of the environment reports which provide information about science and has led to people wanting to understand more information. There's other grant funding opportunities. The largest one I think we really have really directly citizen science is provided by the Australian federal government through their Oz industry program.

EPA has its own citizen science program. We have a small unit of EPA. What we do is aim to collect data to support environment and human health decisions to establish a working relationship with the community. Basically to improve scientific literacy and aid the community in understanding the data and provide informed decisions or support informed decisions that they want to make about what they want to do and how they better understand and want to relate to their environment. We've had a large number of previous citizen science projects and on the list here are the citizen science projects we've currently got going. We've got ambient air monitoring across Victoria, port Melbourne, Bendigo, the inner west, work going on in La Trobe valley as well.

We've also got two new programs, breathe Melbourne and air seeker. Air seeker involves people wearing wearable monitors to collect data. Breathe Melbourne is using backpacks and school kids wearing them to get them to better understand what the potential exposures may be on the way to school. Future piece of work which is in the early stages will be anthropogenic contaminants in honey bees. We'll talk about what we've already done. And of course GardenSafe which will be a program of key importance for our team in the next 12 months. So I want to give you a few examples of successful citizen science.

Some of the work that I've been involved in and also Kara Fry has been involved in and in completing this work I've had many fantastic students and colleagues - I give my acknowledgment to all of them and say my significant and authentic thanks for them for the effort and time they've put in helping us publish this work, collect the data and polish the data and produce it to a format that's acceptable for public publication. A snapshot of what we've done covering house dust, honey bees and smelter sources and micro plastics...we've engaged citizens. We've engaged communities and people to try and collect the data so the indoor micro plastics you can see on the right-hand side, the slide on the global dust. We reached out to over 30 countries and people collecting data. The smelter sources study we reached out to Noumea to help us collect information about soils and gardens and dust in their homes.

In the honey bee program that we've already published we reached out to...in order to access them to collect samples. People are really engaged and really interested and of course we always share the results with them on completion. Some of the work we've done so form VegeSafe. That's looking at other traces in the urban environment. The focus is on soils. People sample their own veggie beds and send their soils to us for analysis. I'll show you some of the results. It's just past 9 years since we started this in September 2019 when VegeSafe was launched. Dr Martin will be talking shortly and they've taken our design and made their own unique program called Soilsafe Aotearoa and he'll talk about why they're doing it and what they've found so far. We've talked to partners in the UK and they're doing similar work and we'll share the data in a portal and I'll talk about that shortly. All of the data we collect as part of these programs is available to the global community. That's the purpose of this. It's not for keeping the data for ourselves.

As part of this work we undertook this national garden soil trace element study VegeSafe. The reason why it's been so successful thousands of samples from thousands of homes is because unlike most scientific studies where people work for the communities we flipped that, we'll work for the communities. Is our soil safe for using for vegies?  Is it contaminated?  We live in the study. We know there are industrial sites. That's how the program originally started. Here's a snapshot from the publication which is listed on the right which is an environment international. At the time we had just over 17,000 samples. That has ballooned to over 25,000 samples and more than 6,000 homes. You can see a snapshot of Australia, all the major cities of where the samples have been collected. They're still coming in. What we did we wanted to bring science to the people. People mailed their dirt to us and when they send the dirt to us we collect information on metadata about their homes, are their homes... we get their address information, where the samples are collected along with a few other basic questions.

When the soil comes in it's analysed as is because there's so many samples we can't do what would really be the most optimal treatment which would be drying and sieving the soil. We analyse as it is. We've done some additional work, quality assurance work, to see what the as is measures. How they compare to standard laboratory treatment of soils. That's all published in that environment international study which I showed on the previous slide. In doing this work we're able then to address community concerns by providing information to the community and some advice. Quite often we receive phone calls from the community. We have a Facebook site. People send us messages or will email us, call us for further additional advice.

We've had other projects that have stemmed on from this work which involved actually doing a forensic analysis in people's homes to identify what the source components are. They have significantly... levels and this was not in a lead mining or smelting town. We haven't published that work yet but what it turned out to be was the people had contaminated themselves inadvertently through using their pepper pot which was composed of lead. It sounds ridiculous but that was the outcome and it took us some time to discover this. So people get their results. They have a report which is a screenshot as you can see on the right of a report. We've called it Mr Soil. We compare the results to Australian guidelines. We sometimes provide information or we did do previously. We've now streamlined it to give Australia not just global measures. People compare that to other data we publish.

We give information on what to do next in the event soil is contaminated. We provide links and guidance. We draw on various materials...about what people should do and why they should do it. Of course, as I noted earlier, all the data that we collect is uploaded to map my environment.com. You can go on there and you can look at the data. The data is all deidentified. It's what's called it gitted going in and gitted when it's published. Each time you refresh the page or go on to the site the data is regitted. People's privacy is protected. So some results. What we found when we looked at VegeSafe on these thousands of soils very clear across every city across Australia and in America and - well, I was going to say in New Zealand but it might be a slightly different story.

Largely in New Zealand and in the UK lead is the primary element of concern. That's because we use lead in paint and gasoline. In Australia we have used it for 70 from 1932 to 2002 and Dr Louise Kristenson completed a study where she calculated the emissions. The emissions totalled more than 240,000 tonnes of lead was emitted and deposited in the environment, largely in cities, which is why our inner cities are contaminated. What you can see in this map of Melbourne, the darker brown areas are the areas which are in this sort of older inner parts of Melbourne that are typically more contaminated where we get exceedances of soil up to 70% in some locations, particularly in Sydney where it's worse than Melbourne where soil trace met ales - soil lead concentrations in people's gardens exceed the national criteria for residential gardens of 300 milligrams per kilogram. What we also did was we looked at the soil data and modelled, as Dr Cynthia Iser who is now at the University of Adelaide...about 20% of Australian gardens may produce or have... that might exceed... particularly associated with leafy green vegetables.

Mostly...when we provide the data what we're able to say to people is, get your soil tested so you know what situation you've got. We typically recommend people use a raised bed and they bring in imported soil. We also run a sister program DustSafe. People send in their vacuum dust. We analyse it. It's available on map my environment the data. We did a global study, 35 countries, 2,500 samples that we received in and that we published that information not only on map my environment. You can see a snapshot of the dust samples we received in Melbourne. When you're on the website toggle between dust and soil. You can see the same pattern as you see with soil. It's in the older inner parts of the Sydney where they're primarily contaminated with elevated concentrations of trace metals. It's typically lead. However, especially for Adam, I've put on this graph because New Zealand is a little bit quirky.

We can see in Australia on the left-hand side of this graph we have quite a large range of lead concentrations and New Zealand has a reasonably large range but Australia is on the data that we analysed, on the samples that we received, actually have the worst lead concentrations in the samples that we received. New Zealand is a bit quirky. Lots of arsenic. Maybe Dr Martin can briefly explain why that might be. Why the soil arsenic in the dust but I'll nudge along the way it's possibly because people are burning... arse not wood or it could be from volcanic emissions. I'll leave that to Dr Martin's expertise to provide some insight. So in addition to the work that we also worked with people with citizen scientists who collect honey and have bees in their garden and this produced some quite interesting research.

This wasn't the purpose of the original research to identify that honey was fake or not. It was an unintentional outcome because we went to look at trace metals in honey and it turned out 27% of all the global honeys we sampled with my student at the time who was on the front page of the Sydney Morning Herald, 27% turned out to be adult rated... use that for our trace metal analysis. It also made the front page of The Age as well. So what we did then we were able to look at the concentrations. We looked at native bees and European bees and conflict of interest identified here the honey in the middle is my own honey. Non-commercial honey and not sold. I give it away as presents for people who come to see me. On the left-hand side there's a diagram that shows concentration in bees. The dark brown is navy bees. The green is European honey bees. You can see they're pretty similar.

When you look at the honey on the right, I'll save you the efforts of crawling through it but basically what we can see is that the concentrations in honey is about an order of magnitude less than what you can see in the bees. We saw exactly the same stuff which is not published in Noumea when we looked at the relationship of bees and honey with distance from the nickel smelter in honey. They're 10 times more contaminated in nickel than what you can find in honey. The honey is really fine to eat even in places like Broken Hill. There's no concern. The bees have it and seem to absorb the contaminants and it doesn't really get passed on into the honey in remotely the same concentrations. In addition to that we did a study on backyard chickens and their eggs. We knew that back yards were contaminated. We wanted to know does that affect the chicken and the eggs. We carried out another citizen science study.

This was published Sara published this this year. You can see on the left-hand side is the relationship we identified between people's garden soil and egg quality. So we set a benchmark, there's no actual standard for backyard eggs or even eggs full stop. We set a benchmark of 100 micrograms per kilogram and that was based on international literature. What we showed was in order to keep the egg let concentration below the benchmark of 100 micrograms per kilogram soil concentrations need to be less than 117. That's nearly one-third lower than the Australian guideline.

We also looked at what's in the - sorry. I should say we also compared what's in backyard eggs versus commercial eggs. It was very clear that commercial eggs are trace metal clean relative to backyard eggs. That's typically because many of those commercial eggs are produced in rural areas where there's typically very low soil contaminants compared to domestic eggs which many of the samples we received, not all but many were from the inner parts of Sydney in this particular study. Those gardens had elevated levels of soil lead. That gets into the chicken which gets into the egg.

What does that mean?  Is the dark areas are in the areas in Sydney that are not so suitable for keeping chickens because they exceed 117 milligrams per kilogram and the same pattern plays out in Melbourne. It's the older inner parts typically of the city where those areas are probably not so suitable you might want to get your soils tested in your particular house to make sure that the soils are suitable for keeping chickens. We assessed the work. We wanted to know did this citizen science work. Kara and myself and Cynthia published this study this year. We surveyed just over 500 people, do you like our work?  Does it work for you?  What we found when we looked at the data if you look at the pie chart on the right over 90% of participants said they would either somewhat likely or extremely likely recommend our programs VegeSafe and DustSafe to another person.

I think the nicest thing at all is captured on the bottom right which really says, this really inspired my daughter. Now she wants to be an environmental scientist. We've changed the world for one person. That is a real outcome. That's just terrific. That's the whole point of citizen science. People are hungry for knowledge. We engage them. They embrace it. It takes them on their own particular journey. So moving forward, getting involved is the Australian citizen science association. You can go on the website and find a citizen science project of your interest or in your location. We have a number of citizen science projects. There's a whole list of them on the right-hand side that EPA is doing. You can find details about what we're doing and what we're up to and why we're up to it on our website. You can just Google EPA Victoria citizen science and you can find that information.

Finally, looking forward our new strategy is really about with GardenSafe fits in nicely with our strategic plan because it focuses on knowledge and prevention of harm. It puts citizens first. It engages community about the difference between houses at risk and GardenSafe will help deliver one of the many things that are listed as part of our strategic plan which came out 1st of July this year and sets us up for the next five years. That's the end of my slides thankfully.

I'm looking forward now to inducing you to our next speaker. Dr Adam Martin. He's a geochemist with more than 20 years of research experience. He was originally born in Melbourne. But clearly now resides in New Zealand. He completed his undergraduate studies with Honours at Monash University before completing his doctorate at Otago university in New Zealand. He then went off to the UK where he was a postdoctoral researcher before he took up his position at GNS science where he now works. Dr Martin is the New Zealand representative for the RUGS commission on global chemist baselines and he's leading the...soil chemistry data in urban and regional settings across New Zealand. He's a principal investigator in community science programs analysing both soil and dust in New Zealand as part of the Aotearoa SoilSafe program. It's designed to support.

Please welcome me in introducing Dr Adam Martin to speak today on his program SoilSafe seminar series. 

Dr Martin: 

Thank you very much, Mark.

Welcome. Hello everyone. I'm looking forward to talking to you today. I'm going to give you a high level overview of what we're doing here in New Zealand and hopefully we can have a bit of fun along the way as well.

So you can see on this main photograph here. This is part of the reason I wanted to come to New Zealand. This is the sort of area we can do field work in. This is just inland from where I live. That's Lake Wakatipu in the program. We've been helicoptered up to collect soils and it's a perfect sort of day. I'm using the arrows. I'm using this. There we go. So you can see in the top left here. This is where I'm talking to you from today, Dunedin right on the South Coast.

As Mark has mentioned I grew up in Chad stone. I grew up in Melbourne. I'm a Richmond tigers fan for all the ups and downs which that entails. I do know what I'm talking about when I'm talking to a whole lot of Victorians. It's okay. I did my research in Melbourne but then I've done other study in the UK and New Zealand and that's where I'm based now. So I wanted to share this photograph on the top right. That's me as a first year university student. I had a lot less grey hair. I was a lot skinnier. My dress sense is still as terrible. That's my sister but I wanted to show you this because this is the backyard I grew up in. On the right we've got a lemon tree that was fruiting all year round. It was amazing. We've got a pear tree. We had plums, almonds. Cockatoos would come down and eat. Fig trees, tomatoes. Over the back fence there was where our neighbours George and Freida lived. George loved his fruit trees and sprayed them with chemicals to the 60s. I would love to know what was in the chemicals he was spraying. That's just a reminder it's not just what you've done to your back yards but what generations before you have done to your backyard as well.

I'm going to give a brief talk about what's going on in New Zealand but I've got so many collaborators. So you can see them listed on the bottom including Mark and Kara who are on this call. We have lots of students. We wouldn't be able to do this work without the students we have helping us out. So SoilSafe Aotearoa. This all kicked off because we started listening to talks given by Mark. We invited Mark and Kara and their team over to New Zealand. We took the great idea they had and moved it to New Zealand and modified it. Some of the things we felt we had to change really were culture. There's a close relationship with the land and the soil in New Zealand so I'm going to read you some...(foreign language spoken). While food provides the blood in our veins, our health is drawn from the land and soil. So we really need to emphasise and respect the connection to land.

When people send in their soil sample as part of this sometimes they want it back. So it's just about having cultural sensitivity and awareness about what we do. We also have interesting geology in New Zealand. On the far left here all you need to take from this is that there's a whole lot of different striped coloured which means they're all different rock types that were originally pressed up against Australia as part of Gondwana and ripped up again. We have active volcanoes, faulting on the map, faulting two plates together. It is middle active. The middle diagram is showing rainfall. I've highlighted one area on the west coast where we get 16 metres per year. That's the fifth wettest place on earth. It's wonderful. We just re-emphasise culture. Our website is bilingual in English and Teryamari. Our place of concept... is our relationship to the land, our place to sit and... we're not advanced as you guys in Australia yet. We've been running about a year and a half. We've got 660 homes so far. Over 3,000 samples. We've got samples coming in every day. It's a good level of engagement and you can see a map in the top right-hand corner of - roughly outlining the samples.

If you don't know New Zealand geography the largest circles are our largest cities. That's not surprising. On the left-hand side was our student that we had helping us for the first year. That's a year's worth of samples in that bucket that they're obviously very proud of measuring. Just like in Australia we return a report to all our community science participants showing different metal concentrations in their soil. So what I find really interesting is depending on what country you're in there's different guidelines as to how much metal you can have in your soil. I won't get into why but it's different between New Zealand, Australia, North America, Europe, everyone calculates it in their own way but what we have here is if you look at the graph on the left, I know there's a lot of numbers, I'm going to really simplify it though.

So the vertical rectangle in the middle blue that is all 3,000 arsenic samples we've measured so far. The top of the blue rectangle everything from the top below is 75% of our data. That's just what this plot represents. The horizontal lines are the New Zealand guidelines. So blue we have 17 milligrams per kilogram and that's as if a quarter of your diet you eat from what you grow at your house. If you eat less you can obviously have more metals because less is going into your body. At 10% you can have 20 milligrams per kilogram and if you're not eating anything at your home at all you can have more because your exposure is less. For arsenic you can see we have about - around about 20% of samples have the possibility of being above guidelines if you happen to eat food from your garden.

On the right-hand side it's the exact same story with lead. So Mark was talking a lot about the 300 milligram threshold. We have a range of 160 to 500, again depending on how much of your own food you eat from your garden or if you eat anything. The big take away from this is that separate or different from Australia is that we've got possible issues with led and arsenic but this is actually - this isn't a bad news story. It means 4 out of 5 samples that we're measuring are below guidelines grow vegetables, no problems, everything is okay. The other 1 in 5 we just have to start to think about what we might do so that we can safely eat our vegetables. One of the questions I ask myself is how do we actually know these metals we're measuring is this just natural, does it naturally occur or are humans putting metals in the soil. To do that we look at studies of chemistry and urban environments.

So Mark mentioned that the inner parts of cities in Australia have the highest metal in soil concentrations. We're finding the exact same thing in New Zealand. So in the middle here I'm showing it for Dunedin which is where I'm giving the talk from. It's about the population of Ballarat. In the largest city Auckland right up north is about the same population as Adelaide, if you think of it that way. In both instances you've got high concentrations, the warm colours, the reds in the city centre. The drop off as you go out into farm land. So that's a really good correlation between anthropogenic input so human activity in your soil and we're doing things just like Australia around the world around using lead isotopes to actually trace what the source of lead is so we can show causation between human activity and what we do to our environment. On the right-hand side are the places we're sampling from. We're right in people's gardens. This is representative of where people live. If you step back out we've done that at a regional scale so on the left that's the southern south island of New Zealand. We haven't published it yet but on the right-hand side we've got data for the whole country now.

So we can put it in context from the sample someone sends in from their garden. We can understand what that means for the garden, the city, the region and the country. So it's really been quite neat. To give you an idea New Zealand and Victoria are more or less the same size so that's the sort of coverage we have. So when we do SoilSafe Aotearoa it's normally the parents. We engage a lot with adults with the program. We also engage with younger people. One fifth of New Zealand population are children at the moment.

We've started a new program called SoilSafe kids. It's a promotion and outreach education activity that we're doing. It encourages kids to think about soil, why it's relevant and we offer a range of programs. So it can be from one hour that the teacher can give before lunchtime to a three-day program that's a lot more - a much larger project for the school kids. So you can either - we can either give you the material and you teach it completely. We can do it virtually or do it face-to-face or a mix. It's been really good actually. So these are some of the activity sheets that we have. So on the left it's a very tactile experiment. It's about touching your soil, squeezing it, estimating clay content, rolling it out and being actually able to say something about the soil you have when you're the kids.

The one on worms is very popular with the children, I can tell you that. No worms are harmed. They're just observed and put back. It's a really rewarding activity. So when we go out and visit schools you can have it as simple and fun as digging a hole and playing with worms right up to a very university level conversation about trace metal mobility and uptake through soil into plants and humans. So that's been a really good program. And DustSafe. We took again with Mark and Kara we provided some samples around the country to be part of Mark's global study. When we start to get the results back we're finding that there's a really interesting arsenic factor inside the dust. So that's been hinted at before through air quality studies but we've not really shown it in the dust and if you remember back a few slides we're also seeing high arsenic in the soil around people's homes. So it's affecting soil, air quality and dust. So what we've done is we've got our Masters student Declan Fissure in the top left there. I think he'd be happy with the photo. That's good.

We're running a short-term dust study. We've given ourselves 12 months to collect samples. We've got a few hundred homes in already. So people send us in their vacuum cleaner dust. You can see in the bottom left here this is what we get and a close up. It's full of dog hair, human hair, leaves, plastics, rubbish and miscellaneous and our student has to sift that down to the sample in the bottom left corner and we really want to test some of these sources behind what's contributing to the enrichment factors in metals inside New Zealand homes and Mark did mention copper chromium arsenic which we think is a very likely source. New Zealand builds a lot of their homes out of wood, mainly it's out of pinus radiata pine trees. That's very fast growing under the climate conditions we have in New Zealand. If you remember the rainfall diagram I showed you earlier the fast growing means it's soft and we have to treat it so it doesn't rot. If you build a home, if you do any renovations, if you are naughty and burn treated timber all that can contribute to... arsenic in the environment around people's homes.

So because we're a solution-focused program and we want to tell a good news story, not the bad news story, we're always about what can you do if you find you've got a problem what can you do. So if it's outside your home you can send your sample in to SoilSafe Aotearoa and we can assess whether you might have a problem. Some of the best things we recommend just generally move your vegetable bed away from the house because the house is a source of a lot of contaminants. If you're still worried about that you can raise your garden beds and we've tested garden soil around the country and universally we find it's low in trace metals. It's completely fine in all the samples we've tested. The only issue we have is some areas can become dusty and that can be a source of pathways.

You can put pavers over it, suppress the dust a little, grow plants. For inside your home you can submit your samples to the DustSafe program. See if you might have a problem. Treating this is quite simple. It's about keeping any surfaces in good condition inside your house. We've seen from the global dust study that there's a real link between tracking what's outside your house into your home and heavy metals inside your home. If you've got pets, dirty work boots, working outside that's something to be mindful of. We're also seeing heavy... inside your home. Just think about the environment inside your house if you're doing any changes.

I've come to the end of my slides. We've talked briefly about the community science projects we're doing in New Zealand, how it differs from what's going on in Australia, how we're finding similar results to within Australia but with the arsenic factor that's quite different to over here and we'll really looking forward to what's going to happen next. I'm going to stop there, Mark. 

Professor Taylor: 

Brilliant. Thank you very much, Adam, for your insights. Clearly your program is moving along very fast, both dust and soil. It's pretty interesting that the results are similar but you have that unique difference between Australia and New Zealand and that then draws you into a discussion about is that so and ultimately that may lead to - I guess it may lead to important policy or advice changes from government or - I mean, I know we advise about don't burn CCA wood and copper chromium tree wood. That program may need to be revisited. Thank you very for your clear and lucid slides. That's very interesting. We'll get time to talk to Adam at the end when we have a Q&A. 

Dr Martin:  Thank you. 

Professor Taylor: 

I would now like to turn to our final guest speaker Ms Kara fry. Citizen science officer EPA Victoria. Kara has been at EPA Victoria now for about nine months. She leads our GardenSafe program. The purpose of the program is to educate community about our general environmental duty which is to prevent and reduce harm from pollution and waste in our back yards. Her research interests have included exploring patterns of urban pollution in multiple ways including from the soil you grow your veggies in to the bees that pollinate them. Kara has published studies that cover Africa, Noumea, Australia and along with our global work. So I think she's nearly got 10 research publications out which is remarkable for somebody who is only a few months out of her Masters of research. Whilst she was at Macquarie University she led the VegeSafe and DustSafe science programs. She ran the lab there and she helped community across Australia to learn more about pollution in their home environment. Kara, welcome to the seminar series. I look forward to hearing from you. 

Kara:

 Lovely. Thank you, Mark.

So what's in your soil, Victoria?  We want to find out. So I, as Mark has introduced, my name is Kara fry. I'm a citizen science officer at EPA Victoria and my background before that was in all things VegeSafe and DustSafe. So for the past few years I've worked with Mark and with Adam and the team in New Zealand to really bring these programs to life and to help communities across the world understand what's in their homes and what's in their back yards. So I'm really pleased to be here today to be able to prevent EPA Victoria's newest citizen science program called GardenSafe. So from the previous presentations we know a few things. We know that harmful chemicals can be present in our environment and in our homes.

We also know that urban areas, particularly those older inner city suburbs are most impacted by persistent chemicals like lead. At EPA our scientists want to know a bit more. As well as understanding distributions of trace elements like lead we want to know what other contaminants are in your soil and if they present a risk to humans or our health. We also want to know about other variables like soil quality impact urban soil contamination. Since the EPA duty came into effect the environment is now everyone's business. That means we all have a duty to reduce harm and waste.... Through GardenSafe we hope to help you learn more about what's in your soil and what actions you can take to live in a safer and a cleaner environment. Why does all of that matter?  Well, this graphic sums it up nicely. We want people to be able to garden safely. Sometimes if chemicals are in your soil they can be up taken into the vegies that you grow and eat as Mark showed or all eggs that your chickens produce. You can accidentally ingest or inhale particles in the garden and this presents a health risk to you and your children. In addition, contaminants can move through the environment, whether that's moving through dust or soil or groundwater.

The issue of soil contamination can extend beyond your backyard. I want to touch on what Adam said in his 1 in 5 exceedances. That means 4 out of 5 are doing just fine. This whole program is about contextualising the risk. Finding out what's in your soil and do we need to be doing something about it. What is EPA GardenSafe?  Our newest citizen science program. It will run for one year and invites anyone in Victoria to send in soil for testing. It will be analysed for a suite of trace elements and we're adding a few things which includes petroleum carbon...this grant is out from what VegeSafe has previously offered providing you with a more detailed snapshot of what's in your soil. Other than the cost to mail your sample to us there is no fee for participating. It's something great that any Victorian can jump onboard.

So let's take a closer look into what we will tell you about. First up is trace elements. These are naturally occurring things that you'd find in the periodic table of elements. However, through human activities such as industrial activity or lead paint and lead petrol we can find these trace elements in our environment in elevated concentrations and sometimes they're levels of concern. Trace elements, such as lead from lead paint and lead petrol as Mark and Adam have touched on are still a persistent risk and we know they impact on the signatures. We also look at petroleum hydrocarbons are crude oil components like oil and diesel and these can be harmful in high concentrations. At EPA we often go into the field to respond to oil spills...like a backyard before. That's something really exciting that the backyard brings. Our third category that is new is a soil quality indicators. This includes things like soil texture, nutrient levels, the amount of organic material so leaf litter and compost in your soil. This impacts how well your soil can grow. To round off the program really nicely linking soil contaminants to our overall soil health to help you grow your vegies as well as possible.

We have two pieces of an little equipment that make this work. The first is a fluorescence spectrometer or FRS for short or an infrared spectrometer. Both provide return results in less than a minute. They are portable and they can accompany our EPA officers when they go out in the field. The FRS uses x-rays to...eight key trace elements. These are the same ones that VegeSafe addresses. These are selected because they often add to the soil through human activities and they can produce a human health risk at specific concentrations. These include things like arsenic...led and zinc listed there to test your knowledge of the periodic table. We also have these new things that we're expanding on. So this includes our soil quality indicator testing, a key component here is the nutrients phosphorus and potassium. These are essential for plant functioning.

You also get the concentration as part of your GardenSafe report. The RemScan infrared spectrometer looks at everything harvest based and looks at a whole new world of everything with GardenSafe...like total petroleum hydrocarbons so that's the petrol and crude oil based products. It is commonly entering the environment through spills. It's not what you've done in your backyard but what people before you might have done as well. The RemScan provides us with these general soil quality indicators. We've got things like soil texture, your composition of sand, silt and clay...and all those good things. This snapshot is a bit of a pulse check in your soil. It helps you to see it has all the things to produce great vegies. Now, I don't want to say it but participating in GardenSafe it is as easy as 1, 2, 3. 1 is to jump online and register. The URL is there also at the end of the presentation and you'll get it via email once you've wrapped up.

Once you've registered step 2 is to collect your samples. To collect your samples you need things you already have lying around your house. A permanent marker, zip lock bags a...it's important that they are these three locations so we have an understanding of what's going on in your front yard, backyard and your veggie pack. Then we move on to step 3 which is posting your samples to us. Then you can leave the rest up to our scientists. Once our scientists have analysed your sample you will be emailed a report containing the screening results from your garden. This report includes the Australian guidelines to compare your soil concentrations against and links to supporting EPA's guidance on how to reduce harm and pollution from waste. This walks you through each step we test for.

Hopefully the resources will help you understand and contextualise your results. Then the results that we collect, as Mark has touched on, will be displayed on this global interactive map called map my environment.com. This website is available for you to jump online. You can view it across the state of Victoria, across the country or across the world. You can zoom into Dunedin or Adam. We've got a lot of work in Indianapolis or the UK.... and how they exist in our environment. In the example above it shows the state of Victoria. These are existing VegeSafe samples from barns Dale all the way to Mildura. GardenSafe results will go on to this map as well. So the resource is going to continue to grow.

We want to keep your private information private. So all data as Mark touched on is double deidentified before it goes on preventing identification of specific sites or specific homes. Beyond this EPA will use the data collected from GardenSafe to inform our state of knowledge about our environmental pollution particularly in urban areas or rural areas. It will help us to produce research articles and will also help us produce our citizen science efforts. We're really excited about this project because it builds on previous programs like VegeSafe and SoilSafe. We know that there are lots of different sources of contamination in our environment. That these sources change depending on what happens in that area. So from the work of previous citizen scientists we know inner city areas have higher concentrations of lead. We know that...what we might see in a farm land or a forest. We know at the centre of all of this is your home and your garden. Through GardenSafe we get to build on the knowledge. Not only understanding EPA's understanding of urban soil but also helping you to understand...this is not just in terms of soil contamination but also soil health to help you grow the best vegies possible in soil you have confidence in.

So now that you have all of the info you're ready to jump online and register. You are the first participants in GardenSafe and welcome aboard. Give it a go. Have some patience with us and let us know what you think. While I'm here I'd like to thank our Chief Environmental Scientist Mark Taylor for his previous work at EPA and also to Adam Martin and all of the New Zealand team for taking this idea and making it a whole new thing. It's really fantastic to see a whole new perspective on the whole that's already been done and I look forward to championing this work at EPA and giving it a new spin. So thank you very much. 

Professor Taylor: 

Kara, thank you so much for your slides and your talk. I really like the phrase, pulse check. I wish I had thought of that myself. That's exactly what GardenSafe is going to get people to do. Give a pulse check on the quality of their soils...in their back yards has increased particularly over the last couple of years during the pandemic there was nothing else to do so you might as well grow some food at home. Of course, rising prices in supermarkets has also increased people's interest and people's willingness to get a bit of dirt under their fingers. If you've got kids there's nothing better than getting your kids to interact with nature and...the educational stuff you've done, Adam.

The whole thing about worms. Kids love this stuff. It's fascinating. It's what turns the soil over. Different times of worms. Aerating the soil. When you combine all this information gardeners and...I love your work, Kara, on the RemScan. Thank you for doggedly ploughing through the introduction of the RemScan and adding to what we've delivered before previously through VegeSafe to provide new and important and very different information for the community. I think it's going to make a significant difference.

What I'd like to do now, I think we've been open for questions, I would like to open up the Q&A for a parallel discussion between Adam, Kara and myself. I'd invite you to type in any questions you've got into the relevant box which I don't believe I can see at this moment in time. I think they'll come through on a feed for me I do believe. While we're waiting for those questions I just wondered, Adam, do you have any thoughts about GardenSafe that you've seen presented today and you might like to take over to New Zealand?  

Dr Martin:

Yeah. This RemScan looks really interesting, especially about the soil quality indicators. I think people might really appreciate that and total organic carbon in the urban environment is another interesting research area because a lot of the time we cookie cut out urban areas from our total carbon calculation. So, yeah, that will be very interesting to see how it reports and people's feedback on whether they like it. I also really liked that publication you made on what people thought of the study. That seemed really interesting actually so. 

Professor Taylor: 

That's great. I'm just trying to work out how to see the questions. I've asked them to be pasted in. Can anybody else see them here?  

Dr Martin:  Not yet. 

Kara:  I can't either. 

Professor Taylor: 

Okay. One has come through. Thank you very much to Whatsapp which is a save the day for us. So the first question we have is: Are there any preparation methods for pre-processing foods in the home to render them safer from heavy metals. Perhaps natural chelators or boiling or replacing the water with purified water. I'm happy to have a go. I know Kara can answer that with her eyes closed. 

Kara:  I think the best thing is to firstly know what's in your soil. If heavy metals are...washing your vegies thoroughly particularly your broccoli, lettuce where soil can get in and amongst it. That's a good step. Something that everyone can and should be doing. In terms of veggie uptake we see that leafy... have a higher uptake like citrus. If you are living in an environment that might be affected by heavy metals or you're concerned about where your produce is coming from growing citrus over choosing a leafy green is a better choice. Do you want to add to that one?  

Professor Taylor: 

Not really. You must wash your vegies anyway. Especially like snails in your garden. You wash them thoroughly. If you've used - I was quite interested to hear Adam say this is a piece of work that I wanted to know but ran out of time to do, Adam. Analysing commercial soils, compost that you would put in. That's interesting to find that you've identified it on the whole which I take it as a small subset are not on the whole. On the whole soils are clean. I've seen previously - there have been examples where soils have contained elevated levels of lead more than what we've been comfortable with from people who have sent in soils that have been replaced by commercial soils. I have not done that work so it's only second-hand. So the other thing is - the second question that we have is: Any thoughts on the safety of fruiting plants. You touched on that, Kara. Do you want to continue a bit more - contamination is on my mind. Give a bit more information about that?  About fruiting plants versus leafy greens, et cetera?  

Kara:  Yeah. So we've got to think about how your vegies are interacting with the soil. So a leafy plants have fast growth rate. Uptaking a lot. Getting all the nutrients they need to produce the big leaves. You've also got to think about leafy vegetables. Things in the ground that might have direct contact with the soil. By the time you get up to an old orange tree across the branches and into the fruit generally the concentrations we see are significantly lower. It's putting all those things into perspective when you're considering your home grown produce but I really want to stress if you are living in an area where you think heavy metal contamination is a problem have your soil tested. Grow your vegies in a raised bed. If you can eliminate the problem altogether that's so much better than trying to deal with it bit by bit as you go. 

Professor Taylor:  The next question for the panel is: In light of how some soils in some LGAs have concerning levels of trace metals such as lead has there been any research or insight into whether... brick used to build homes is a potential exposure risk for those trace metals?  

Dr Martin:  I can comment briefly from New Zealand. We haven't thought about mud brick but commercial bricks we're measuring commercial bricks to see what the trace metal concentration is. When I say we are literally this week we are doing it. We don't have the results but it's a great question and other people are thinking about it. Watch this space. 

Professor Taylor:  That is an interesting question. Thanks for that, Adam. What we did with VegeSafe we knew the construction materials used in people's houses and then we used that information to screen the data and PhD students actually did the analysis and looked at which construction materials was associated with the greatest trace elements. It was always timber homes that had been painted typically had soils that were more contaminated. As you would know that makes sense because timber homes that are usually painted, timber homes are often much older and the older homes have been painted with lead-based paint. That's flaked off with time and that's contaminated garden soil. We didn't do bricks but that's interesting. I would say bricks have to weather and degrade and for that material to get into the soil to influence trace metal chemistry. So next question, somebody's asked if they can submit soils associated for a business they work for. The answer to that is no. This is really for residential gardeners. We're not a commercial outfit. If it's for business you need to send your soils to a commercial facility, one of the NADA commercial laboratories. There are many of them which are available. I won't reveal them here. Commercial in confidence can't be seen to be recommending one company over another, I won't recommend any here. The next question should we see drier samples for better results?  

Kara:  Leave it up for us. For VegeSafe we would analyse the samples as is. With GardenSafe we're doing minimal preparation steps. Every sample will be sieved to 2 millimetres that's the definition of soil. Anything above 2 is not soil. Don't ask me what that is. We sieve everything above 2 mils and dry...and gives you some slightly better results. Although having worked for VegeSafe and being the one behind all the quality control processes in the past both ways are just as good. Yeah. Don't worry about that. Leave that one up to us. 

Professor Taylor:   Thank you very much, Kara. So we have another question from Chloe. I think you'll be well versed to answer this again, Kara. It says, will people have a duty to manage contaminated soil under the new EPA Act. What's that likely to involve and how much will that cost for remedy contamination?  I think you were ready to answer it. I think you anticipated it. 

Kara:  Great question. EPA at Victoria we are in a very new, sort of, framework now with our general environmental duty. This shifts the burden of responding to identifying contamination to the duty holder or the land owner. This actually makes GardenSafe a really great platform because now it's everyone's responsibility to care about their environment, prevent harm from pollution and waste. As I touched on in my speech that's sometimes quite hard for community to do. So GardenSafe fills that gap. We are producing screening level results to give you a snapshot of what's in your soil. So if there are any exceedances of the Australian guidelines provided there's some information on how you could conduct further testing so that might be getting an environmental consultant onboard or reducing harm from contaminants through raised beds and things like that. It is not anticipated GardenSafe participants would be issued with any sort of infringement or any data used for compliance or enforcement processes by the EPA. This is an opt in process. It is something you are doing to understand your environment better. You are being given the tools to understand, contextualise your results and there are avenues for further investigation if required. 

Professor Taylor:  Thank you. That's a very clear answer. There has been another question along a similar line, the important thing is the program is designed...situation and that's really where we will be leaving it. That really fits within the premise of the general environment and duty. Moving on to other topics, somebody has asked, Adam you may be placed to answer this one, they're asking if we could use pallets as garden beds or are there harmful chemicals in them. I actually don't know the answer to them. I don't think they're treated pallets. I think it's raw wood. 

Dr Martin:  Speaking from New Zealand some are treated and some aren't. They are marked. I can't remember but you can look it up. Some have been treated and shouldn't be burnt and we'd take that as guideline not to use it in your garden construction. Others are untreated and would be fine as any other piece of wood you'd get from a garden centre. Yes. Have a little bit of caution but there are pallets out there you can use. 

Professor Taylor:   I mean, one thing that people could do is line the pallet anyway with geo text fabric on the bottom. They could do that or other sites and then use those garden pallets for their raised beds. That would be fine. Do you have a comment, Kara?  

Kara:  On the general topic think about what you're making your garden bed out of before you make it. So things like tyres, they can leech a whole range of chemicals as well. Railway sleepers are usually treated timber as well. So proceed with caution. If in doubt get some untreated timber from your hardware before you get cracking. 

Professor Taylor:  Thank you. There's another question here. It's why not look for toxic pesticides used around residential homes, DDT previously used in garden or...used for gardening and termite eradication. That's a really good question. We did consider that. The cost of analysis for pesticides in soil is slightly prohibited. It's in the order of about $400 per sample. That's beyond the reach and financial capabilities of the citizen science program. So we have opted not to do that because it would limit how many people could benefit from the program, if we offered it. We'd have to do it first come, first serve. People would miss out. We've opted for things which are affordable and within reach of the program and would be likely to be of most benefit to people across the state. Another question here is there any scope to look at soil safety for pets and kids?  If I don't grow vegies but have pets readily playing in the yard and eating grass, et cetera. What are those risks?  Would any of the other panel like to answer that question?  

Kara:  I can jump on in. Look, we would love to reflect what New Zealand is doing. They work with SoilSafe kids. It's absolutely fantastic to see a different target audience being involved in learning about their soil and at such an early age. It's still worthwhile having your soil tested if you're not an avid veggie gardener. It contextualises what's going on in your backyard. We can't make a direct relationship with what's going on with your pet. It gives you a direct relationship of what's going on. If it there are high levels of lead or arsenic and you've got your pet rolling around in your backyard you can make an informed choice of what you can do about it. 

Professor Taylor:  Thank you very much, Kara. So I would say in terms of safety for pets we've published a study that's available for free. You can just pull that up and read that. The other publication about soil garden safety, et cetera, is the environment international study where we published the VegeSafe data and would encourage people who are interested to get that publication and read that because it's freely accessible, it's open access. It's got a lot of answers to some of the questions that are listed here. Another question here is asking, will this program utilise existing EPA and science networks or programs such as La Trobe valley water monitoring. I think this program in itself is stand alone of its own community, its own people. It's focused on people's back yards, not water. We've got connections and people's emails and contact details. They can be notified about what programs we've currently got but it's related to because it's citizen science but it's separate to the previous programs. There's nothing stopping people who have been engaged in other programs to participate in this program which includes all citizens who have got soil of some form, whether it's in pots or growing plants or in their garden to submit samples from their residential home. Do you want to add anything to that, Kara?  

Kara:  Exactly, Mark. This is something open to all Victorians. It doesn't matter if you've engaged with EPA citizen science before. Anyone can get involved. People who have, welcome back and get involved as well. It's an opportunity for everyone and really great as we've experienced with VegeSafe and I'm sure as Adam has seen in New Zealand it really forms community with these programs. Head on and send in your soil and get back in touch. 

Professor Taylor:   Thank you, Kara. I'll throw this one to Adam because I think you can answer this one. Given lead fuel is suggested as one soil of one source of lead, is there a link from distance to roads and the level of traffic. Are... yards more contaminated than... I could answer it from ours but I think it would be neat to hear from New Zealand about some of that information. 

Dr Martin:  Yeah. It's a good question. The short answer is yes. There is a link. It does come down to road - how many cars are going past as well and what type of traffic is it, is it wide vehicles or heavy vehicles. So in studies - in some New Zealand cities where they've taken a normal yard and measured 500 chemical samples all around the yard, so basically taken the top layer off there is a correlation between heavier metals in the front yard as opposed to the backyard except in the perimeter of the yard. So as you move away from the house towards the backyard your heavy metal concentrations drop off. So we see, in particular, lead which is from lead fuel but also zinc because you get a zinc compound that hardens up tyre. So with tyre wear you also get that sort of heavy metal. In cities it's not just the road that's in front of your house but the density of the network in the city. So a large city lots of roads you do get that contamination not coming just from your front but all around a property so. 

Professor Taylor:   Thank you very much, Adam. I just went offline for a second. I've got star link as I mentioned and sometimes the trees get in the way. I don't know if you mentioned drip lines. Did you mention drip lines?  

Dr Martin:  I mentioned the perimeter of the house is an exception for it not being just at the front of the house. It's as you move away from the house at the back that you get a drop off in metal concentration. 

Professor Taylor:  Just explain to the listeners. The reason why we often see other lead concentrations in dripline soils. That's the soil that sits below the line... there's two reasons for that and Howard Milke drew attention to this. Emission from cars they come out as particles. They hit the wall of the hands and fall down to the bottom of the soil below your gutter. In addition if the house is an older house the gutter may have been painted with lead paint and that can weather and produce paint chips which may contain lead in the gutters. We've always recommended don't use your dripline locations in soil for growing vegies in. In the United States they find very clearly that they're the most contaminated soils and they found something similar in Australia. The message is really clear. It fits in with exactly what Adam was saying. They're the most contaminated. As you move further away to the backyard your soils become cleaner which is where most people keep their veggie patches. The next question, we've only got a couple more minutes left, one of the questions is - and Kara you would be well placed to answer this. Are there any plans to analyse poly aromatic hydrocarbons in particular BAP because these are common in the inner city soils of Melbourne, that's from Janette. 

Kara:  Thank you, Janette. So at the moment we are just offering the total petroleum hydrocarbon that's anything from the C10 to C40 range. That's what we can get from our RemScan analyser. The idea of GardenSafe just as VegeSafe and SoilSafe has done is that things can grow and evolve. Although it's not within scope at this time, just like we're saying with pesticides, we do have limitations with testing costs and time. It doesn't mean if down the track if there's an opportunity to look at something else that we can always adapt. We are constantly looking for ways to build this program to offer more things for you. 

Professor Taylor:   Thank you, Kara. There's a very similar question in relation to commercial use, commercially produced compost and potting mix are other contaminants of concern including... do any mixes available in Australia also use bio solids as a base... I don't know the answer to whether biosolids are used in compost. I do know the answer to the first question. We are not intending to analyse the soils for PFAS because we would have to off site the analyses. It would cost upwards of $150 for a sample.... I say that because elevated PFAS concentrations are associated largely with locations around military bases or airports or industrial sites. That's relatively contemporary industrial sites. Not old inner city industrial sites and they are occupied with industry over 100 years ago because PFAS didn't come into use until the 1950s. That's not part of the work. As Kara said if opportunity arises down the line funding is available we may include some of that work. Moving on to I think my last question I have which is very timely and we have two minutes left and I have to run to another meeting. This is from anonymous, further to...which vegetables have been found to be more conducive to contaminant uptake?  I think we've half answered this. Kara, would you like to answer this question?  

Kara:  Yeah. I think to repeat the theme of today, lead seems to be the contaminant of concern in urban areas, particularly in Australia. The scale of generally speaking is your leafy greens we might see the highest lead uptake. Come down through to your root vegies and across to your citrus. In terms of other contaminants the uptake is not as significant as we would see for lead but also that really depends on the lead in your soil. So coming back full circle, have your soil tested and find out so you can make an informed decision. Mark, is there anything else you'd like to add to that one?  

Professor Taylor:   That's perfect. Basically if there's no contaminants in your soil, carry on gardening and that's the whole premise of the program. So I think that's all we have time for today. Great questions. Deep interest. We'll be available to talk to our community in Victoria. One question was asked that I didn't answer or we didn't answer was if this program was going to become more widely available across Australia, the answer is no because this is for Victorians by EPA Victoria but VegeSafe is still available and people can get their soils analysed for the standard suite of trace metals from other jurisdictions or they can just send it to Adam and ask him to do it. They've got pretty strict bio security rules in New Zealand so don't try that one. So if we haven't had time to respond to all of your questions during the session please submit any further questions you have to contact@epa.vic.gov.au. Thank you, Dr Adam Martin, thank you for your time and to Ms Kara Fry and all attendees who joined us today. We invite you to...lots of food in your home gardens. So finally before we finish up we'd appreciate with you sharing your feedback on today's session via a very short online survey. The link to the survey is now in the chat box and will be circulated later via email. We look forward to seeing you at our next installment of EPA's environment series during the year. Keep an eye on the website for further information. With that we'd like to close and wish everybody a great day. We look forward to seeing you in the next series we have later in the year. Thank you very much. 

Kara:  Thank you, everyone. Goodbye. 

Dr Martin:  Thank you.