Natarsha McPherson and Bertram Ostendorf have recently published on a project from the Nullarbor Plains, ‘Detecting rabbit and wombat warrens in broad-scale satellite imagery’. They found significant correlation between field and satellite based estimates of warrens with a user accuracy of 91% for wombats and 81% for rabbits. However the resolution of Google Earth and Bing maps was too low to detect smaller rabbit warrens. See here for more information on their work.
Early career researcher Natarsha is keen to build on their learnings and Rabbit-Free Australia would like to help. Its hard to manage what you can’t measure and rabbit management starts with locating their warrens. We’ve started a GoFundMe campaign (here) to allow a project to proceed. Please share the campaign with any associates who may be interested in cost-effective ways to survey rabbit abundance across vast landscapes, and drop me an email if you’d like more information on the new project.
Mapping warrens in remote landscapes from space could be a game changer: Image N McPherson