The Mornington Peninsula Vignerons Association (MVPA) and Agriculture Victoria have revealed they will be using the Snap Send Solve platform to locate amenity vines in the Mornington Peninsula help protect the region from biosecurity threats.
Amenity vines are those located in households or in public places, for decorative purposes, but the transfer of threats like Phylloxera can come just as easily from these vines as from commercial vines. The associations have said that one of the difficult elements of surveying these amenity vines is actually discovering their location and that is where the Snap Send Solve platform can help.
“We are thrilled to be an integral part of Agriculture Victoria’s ‘Tackling Phylloxera’ campaign. With more than half a million people in Australia already using the platform to report a range of issues within their community, we believe this is a natural channel for the general community to locate and report amenity vines within the Mornington Peninsula area.”
Snap Send Solve enables anyone who discovers an amenity vine to report the location directly to Agriculture Victoria so that they can undertake an inspection. The app uses GPS to discover the precise location of the reporter and is geo-fenced, so that users can only report amenity vines in the areas that the Agriculture Victoria is looking to survey.
Tyson Lewis, Mornington Peninsula Vignerons Association Technical Committee said: “We’re calling on residents to use this app and notify Agriculture Victoria of the location of any grapevines in public places in their town.
“All commercial, hobby and amenity vines needed to be checked, but amenity vines (those growing in public places) are the hardest to locate.”
The Snap Send Solve app is free to download from the App Store or Google Play.