Database On Pathogen and Indicator Organism Survival in Soils and Other Environmental Media.

Data on survival of pathogen and indicator organism in soils, sediments, organic waste, and waters represent the key information for evaluating management practices and predicting fate and transport of the microorganisms. Such data are, in general, available, but are spread across thousands of publications in the variety of formats. The objective of this work was to develop a database that could be readily accessible, portable, expandable, and had improved search functions. We designed the SUME (Survival of Microorganisms in Environment) database structure with special attention to the selection of terms and parameters that can be used in common searches. The prototype database has been built and tested with data on E. coli, fecal coliforms, and Salmonella. The datasets are taken from scientific publications. Properties of the media, environmental parameters, experimental conditions, and source description are included. Facing the fact that the exponential die-off model is rarely applicable to the real-world environmental data, we included in the database the raw survival data and parameters of several survival models fitted to these data along with model performance statistics. The latter are based on both goodness-of-fit and the number of parameters as related to the total number of observations. The database has the relational structure and is implemented using Microsoft Access. Along with the single-query search, we currently experiment with the fuzzy searches based on the membership and neighborhood relationships. Further development of the SUME database will help to integrate and apply knowledge of the effect of environmental characteristics on microbiological quality and safety.