Safeguarding wallabies against bushfires

 The Conservation Science Research Group and their grant partners at the Department of Planning, Industry and Environment and NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service, have been granted Australian Research Council funding to determine how some of our most threatened wallabies cope with fire. Several PhD students will be studying parma wallabies, red-legged pademelons and other terrestrial marsupials.

 Australia’s catastrophic bushfires of 2019/2020 is estimated to have killed or displaced nearly three billion animals. Climate change is expected to make fires more frequent and more intense. Australia already leads the world in mammalian extinctions, with over 30 species extinct in the past 250 years, and these fires pose a significant threat to over one hundred more.

 The Conservation Science Research Group is a group of interdisciplinary scientists working on all facets of science relevant to conserving our natural environment for future generations. The group includes ecologists, psychologists, zoologists, behavioural ecologists, artists, engineers, lawyers and philosophers.

The group, including Dr Andrea Griffin from the School of Psychology at the University of Newcastle, will be comparing populations in fire-affected areas and fire non-affected areas and asking questions about wallaby distribution, behaviour, foods and stress. The researchers will be recommending where to build corridors so that populations fragmented by habitat destruction can be reconnected.