University of Tasmania, Australia

The Bennett's wallaby and the Rufous wallaby (Tasmanian pademelon) are responsible for damage to agricultural and plantation forests across the Tasmanian landscape. This study involves modelling wallaby home ranges to determine the effectiveness of lethal control.

Due to the phasing out of the use of 1080 poison in Tasmania, land managers now use shooting as the primary method for controlling browsing populations of animals. It remains, however, unclear as to how effective these shooting practices are, due to limited data on animal movement patterns in response to shooting events.

We began coordinating research efforts with an active wallaby management program in order to:

• Study the movement patterns of wallabies before and after a shooting event to determine their short-term movement patterns
• Make reliable recommendations on the use of alternative, non-lethal methods for managing Tasmania's native wildlife populations
• Estimate the population densities of wallabies before and after a shooting event in agricultural and plantation forest area