The North East Forest Alliance (NEFA) have called into question the NSW government’s recently released koala baseline assessments having found the ‘government’s models of koala densities broad and inaccurate, with cleared paddocks near Kyogle claimed to have higher densities of koalas than the Great Koala National Park (GKNP), resulting in greatly inflated population estimates for NSW.’
The NSW government recently released the outcomes of their koala baseline assessments, intended to identify koalas’ distribution and abundance across NSW, and to provide a baseline against which future population changes can be correlated. The outcome included models of koalas’ distribution and densities, and a total NSW koala population estimate of around 274,000, which is over ten times higher than most other estimates.
The NEFA review’s author, Dailan Pugh OAM, described the aims of the baseline survey to obtain accurate maps of koala habitat and populations across NSW as important and worthy.
‘Unfortunately the outputs of the $20 million project are too inaccurate to achieve its aims or provide a baseline to measure future population changes against.
‘The modelled koala densities have not adequately accounted for cleared land, identifying very high koala numbers in farmers’ paddocks, resulting in misleading mapping and grossly inflated population estimates.
‘The assessment utilised drone surveys to identify actual koala densities at 384 sites across the whole of NSW, which is a very small sample.
‘They primarily relied on recordings of male koalas calling at least once in the breeding season, over two weeks at 1,179 sites, to model koala distributions and densities. This appears to have falsely inflated densities because it does not account for the fact that some males may be transients dispersing through poor quality or unsuitable habitat, therefore calls are not necessarily representative of good habitat or resident populations,’ Mr Pugh explained.
‘They extrapolated their survey results across NSW using coarse mapping of aridity, distance to rivers, canopy height, koala feed tree density and soil nitrogen, without accounting for numerous other habitat attributes known to affect koala densities. At the very least they should have excluded cleared paddocks from their model.
‘Based on the model, the largest area of the highest density koala habitat in NSW is to the north-east of Kyogle, with cleared paddocks shown to have higher densities of koalas than found in the best habitat in the GKNP,’ Mr Pugh said.
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