CABI News

4 December 2014 – Today, CABI is celebrating the 20 year anniversary of its Compendium Programme. The first compendium on crop protection began in 1994 and was published in 1998. More have followed year on year. The CABI Compendium Programme encompasses five encyclopedic mixed-media resources covering animal health and production; aquaculture; crop protection; forestry; and invasive species. Each compendium brings together abstracts, full text articles, datasheets, images, maps and more, giving researchers, policy makers, practitioners and professionals access to a mixed media repository of different types of scientifically validated information.

One of the most widely used compendia, the Invasive Species Compendium (ISC), is freely available as an open-access resource for anyone to use, bringing together a wide range of different types of science-based information to support decision-making in invasive species identification, risk assessment and management worldwide.

Improving global food security and safeguarding the environment are key issues of global concern that CABI seeks to address. The compendia play an important role in the organisation’s mission to provide information and apply scientific expertise to solve problems in agriculture and the environment. The compendia help deliver a knowledge resource, for example, for poverty-reduction programmes in Africa, Asia and Latin America, especially through sustainable development programmes with an environmental component. Plant inspectors at the Kenya Plant Health Inspectorate Service in Nairobi say: “We normally use it [the Crop Protection Compendium] on a daily basis and do not know how we could cope without it.”

The Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR) reported in 2006 on the Benefits to Australia of selected CABI products, stating: “Several said that doing the same work without CABI Compendia would be almost impossible.”

CABI Compendium Team Manager, Gareth Richards, says: “We’re excited to be celebrating the compendia’s 20th anniversary, and delighted that our products continue to make a difference to people’s work. We look forward to many years of developing these resources, and already have exciting new developments in the pipeline for 2015 and beyond, including a new Horticulture Compendium due to launch in 2016.”

For CABI’s full range of compendia, see: http://www.cabi.org/publishing-products/compendia/

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