Streamlining Pest Risk Assessment: The qPRAentry R Package for Assessing Potential Pest Entry

Pests' incursions pose a significant threat to agriculture and ecosystem integrity worldwide. Robust quantitative pest risk assessment (qPRA) methodologies are essential for effective evaluation of plant health risks posed by nonindigenous species. In this work, we introduce the comprehensive R package qPRAentry designed specifically for the initial phase of the qPRA, that is, the entry step, which evaluates the movement of a pest into a given area. The package encompasses functions for calculating the quantity of commodities imported from countries where a pest under assessment is present, and for implementing a pathway model able to assess the risk of potential entry of new pest founder populations. It can be easily implemented through the included functions or user-friendly Shiny applications. An overview of qPRAentry's capabilities is presented, describing its functionalities, usage, and practical applications with two case studies that illustrate its performance, demonstrating the ability of the package to contribute to qPRA.