Kararehe Kino — Vertebrate Pest Research Issue 25

March 2015 — Research uptake and impact

In this issue

Editorial – What use is research?

Landcare Research, like all Crown Research Institutes, has agreed a set of national ‘outcomes’ with Government. In pest management, desired outcomes are to improve the protection of New Zealand's terrestrial ecosystems and biodiversity and to increase the ability of New Zealand industries to meet market and community requirements.

A feral cat photographed by a motion-triggered camera in Hawke’s Bay farmland.

Wide-scale predator control for biodiversity in Hawke’s Bay

Introduced predators are implicated in the extinction of 33 terrestrial vertebrate species since European settlement in New Zealand. To prevent further extinctions, predator control must be undertaken on a scale sufficient to allow populations of native animals to recover.

‘Mega-masts’, climate change and the management of invasive mammals

It is well known that many New Zealand plants periodically have years with very high seed production (called masts) and that, for beech forests, populations of invasive rodents increase substantially in mast years. This, in turn, leads to a build-up of populations of stoats and increased predation on indigenous species by rodents and stoats.

<strong>Fig. 2</strong> Spatially explicit sentinel surveillance. For each pig necropsied, a TB-detection kernel is created in a GIS, as depicted graphically, with the radius of the kernel related to average home range size and the height of the kernel to the probability of TB detection by pigs. Image - Graham Nugent

Quantitative assessment of TB freedom in possums

Sometimes, inspired ideas have to wait before they can be implemented. For example, the value of having a quantitative tool for assessing the probability that bovine tuberculosis (TB) had been eliminated from possums in a local area was recognised 8 years before that tool was first used in 2012.

Reducing the cost of DOC’s biodiversity monitoring

Robust biodiversity monitoring programmes are expensive and time-consuming, especially when conducted at large scales. As such, it is important to identify ways of monitoring more quickly and more cheaply without a loss in the quality of information collected.

Two ferrets (male & female), a stoat and a weasel (top to bottom) all trapped during HBRC predator control operations. Image – G. Dickson

Predator control benefits native species but not rabbits

Landcare Research scientists have been working with Hawke’s Bay Regional Council to measure the effectiveness of the council’s predator control operations in protecting native biodiversity, and to review the evidence around a potentially contentious pest control issue concerning landowners in the region.

Vegetation plot in the Zora catchment (1999). In each measurement, the condition of at least 20 individual tagged tussocks is assessed, along with overall cover of all plant species present. Thar activity around each plot is assessed using faecal pellet counts. Image – DOC

Impact of Himalayan thar on snow tussock grasslands in the Southern Alps

Following their introduction into New Zealand in 1904, Himalayan thar (tahr) colonised over 8000 km² and their population grew to over 50,000. However, during the 1970s, aerial commercial hunting reduced their numbers to less than 5000. In 1983, commercial hunting was temporarily banned allowing thar populations to partly recover.