Ruminant farming is critically important in maintaining the viability of rural communities and ensuring food security. Because grazing ruminants are permanently exposed to helminth parasites, efficient worm control is a requirement to guarantee their health, welfare and productivity. Worm control is largely based on preventive use of anthelmintic drugs, but excessive use of anthelmintics has led to anthelmintic resistance, which has become a global threat for effective parasite control. To mitigate anthelmintic resistance in ruminants, sustainable worm control (SWC) strategies should be adopted. The SPARC Community of Practice of farmers, farm advisors and veterinarians will identify needs, practices, barriers and drivers for adoption of SWC practices, develop a list of good practices for SWC in different production systems and regions and demonstrate them on pilot farms. National and international stakeholder networks will share SWC practices among farmers, across borders and production systems (beef and dairy cattle, meet and milk sheep and goats). Dissemination of experiences and results will be facilitated by a Knowledge Exchange Platform on the SPARC website, hosting testimonies, case studies, videos, practice abstracts and decision support tools, available in local languages. SPARC activities and results will be communicated on social media and in professional journals. Overall, SPARC will initiate a lasting European-wide multi-actor community that develops solutions together to curb anthelmintic resistance, aiding in the green transition of European agriculture.

Given the multitude of interactions between animals, humans and production systems, a thorough understanding of infection transmission routes is key in designing good biosecurity measures. Transmission can occur via direct contact but also through a range of indirect routes such as clothing, footwear, contaminated vehicles, air etc. Although all these routes have been described, their relative importance and therefore the importance of the linked biosecurity measures are still poorly understood. Consequently, many of the current biosecurity guidelines are based on empirical evidence making it difficult to rank measures by importance. The overarching goal of BioSecure is to improve the capacity for key actors and decision-makers in livestock farming to understand, prioritise and implement evidence-based, cost-effective and sustainable biosecurity management systems in current and future terrestrial livestock production chains for pigs, poultry, cattle and small ruminants. This will be achieved by: • Setting up and facilitating a multi actor stakeholder forum to support interactive knowledge exchange, bottom-up behavioural change and uptake of the key exploitable results. • Collecting existing biosecurity intelligence throughout the livestock production chain and creating biosecurity risk maps at an EU level for improving future risk analysis. • Quantifying the impact of biosecurity practices through quantitative risk assessment and mathematical models as tools to quantify the probability of introduction and spread of pathogens at farm and sector level. • Improving and extending biosecurity scoring tools for accurate measuring the level of biosecurity and providing adapted and science based advices. • Evaluation and improvement of biosecurity measures through experiments and field studies. • Assessing the socio-economic impact of biosecurity measures both at farm level and beyond.

Farmers, veterinarians and other animal health managers in the livestock sector are currently missing information on prevalence and burden of non-EU-regulated contagious animal diseases. They are in need of adequate tools for risk assessment and for prioritisation of control measures for these diseases. The DECIDE project will develop data-driven decision support tools, which present (i) robust and early signals of disease emergence and options for diagnostic confirmation; and (ii) options for controlling the disease along with their implications in terms of disease spread, economic burden and animal welfare. DECIDE will focus on respiratory and gastro-intestinal syndromes in the three most important terrestrial livestock species (pigs, poultry, cattle) and on growth reduction and mortality in salmonids, the most important aquaculture species. For each of these, we will (i) identify the stakeholder needs; (ii) determine the burden of disease and costs of control measures; (iii) develop data sharing frameworks based on federated data access and federated learning; (iv) build multivariate and multi-level models for creating an early warning system. Together, all of this will form the decision support tools to be integrated in existing farm management systems wherever possible and to be evaluated in several pilot implementations in farms across Europe. To achieve these ambitious goals, DECIDE has assembled a unique multidisciplinary consortium of experts in veterinary epidemiology and diagnostics, data science, mechanistic and predictive modelling, economics, animal welfare and social sciences. The consortium also includes several representatives of stakeholders with ample access to data, such as national animal health agencies, providers of veterinary services or farm equipment suppliers. The results of DECIDE will lead to improved decisions on disease control to increase animal health and welfare and protect human health and the food chain in Europe and beyond.