Ian Mannix
Editor-in-Chief, Cosmos
A new project has begun to count Australia’s koala numbers, a critical element of plans to protect the native marsupials.
The National Koala Monitoring Program (NKMP) is a government-funded program to count the species’ across its range.
Andrew Hoskins from the CSIRO, which undertook the design of the NKMP’s monitoring and data collection, says it’s likely the first comprehensive count will be delivered in about 12 months.
Hoskins describes the survey as a “big undertaking” built on tens of thousands of data points across hundreds of monitoring sites throughout Australia, including 130 in Victoria and 100 in South Australia.
The survey process is peer reviewed and was described in a paper in the Journal of Agricultural, Biological and Environmental Statistics.
It includes audio and drone monitoring, line transects, data retrieval from previous and historic sources, scat analysis and checks by sniffer dogs.
Hoskins’ says the NKMP team’s best estimate on koala numbers drawn from “the best available information” is between 224,000 and 524,000, nationally.
But there are discrepancies between states and one koala agency doubts the approach will be accurate.
The Victorian Government Department of Environment and Climate Action says there is an estimated a state-wide koala population of 459,865, including 412,948 koalas in native forest and woodland and a further 46,917 in eucalypt plantations.
The SA Department of the Environment says there are 114,000 in the Adelaide Hills and Mt Lofty Ranges. At one stage 13,500 on Kangaroo Island (KI) were sterilised, and nearly 4,000 moved to the south east to reduce habitat pressure.
In Queensland it’s been estimated there are about 10,000 koalas in that state. The Koala Research and Monitoring Program conducted population surveys at 62 sites ranging from 8 to 635ha in the south-east, sighting 130 koalas, with animal density across all sampled areas an estimated 0.069 koalas per hectare. The final numbers are extrapolated by habitat size.
Conservationists critical of Victorian assessments
The Australian Koala Foundation (AKF) is concerned that the national koala population is massively over-estimated. In a publication explaining how 8m koalas were killed for their fur in colonial times, it says it rejects claims that koalas were never wildly abundant: it estimates there are just 60,000 koalas remaining.
AKF Chair, Deborah Tabart, says: “The AKF does not trust the new (counting) methods.”
The AKF counts the carrying capacity of available habitat and has spent millions of dollars on its surveys over the years,
Its Koala Habitat Atlas “has been designed to illustrate the results of enormous amounts of data collected from tens of thousands of trees. It has made the process of mapping such vast areas simpler and quicker than was previously possible with traditional survey methods because of the GIS’s ability to predict and model data,” its website says. “Unlike other projects that map the location of individuals within a species, the Koala Habitat Atlas can show us where suitable Koala habitats occur even when the animals are not present.”
“Not counting Koalas in plantations (which no-one really knows), we stand by our figures unless someone shows us there are more,” Tabart says.
“There is not a single Koala anywhere in Australia that is safe and secure, until their habitat is protected by law.”
Koalas have ‘vulnerable’ conservation status on the international IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. In February 2022, the combined koala populations of Queensland, New South Wales and the Australian Capital Territory were moved from ‘vulnerable’ to ‘endangered’ under the Federal Government’s Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act due to increased frequency and intensity of drought and high temperatures, increasing bushfires, habitat loss, disease and road kill.
There’s a different way to count koala numbers
