You can't manage what you can't measure project

i'm dr steve macleod i'm a principal
research scientist with the new south
wales department of primary industry
i'm running a project
to look at the distribution abundance of
kangaroos on a property level

the tool is to give landholders the
chance to understand
even estimate how many kangaroos they
might have on their place at any one
time
so what we do is
use the broad-scale aerial survey data
which is conducted annually for the
calculation of the commercial harvest
and that data is very useful
in calculating the quota it's not so
useful for individual land holders
because there's lots of areas which are
not surveyed and their most properties
aren't
so what we're doing is trying to
estimate what the density is in between
those areas that are surveyed to give a
few land holders a much better idea on
how many kangaroos they might have
and we do this by
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recording the location of every kangaroo
that we see during the broad-scale
aerial surveys
and relating that back to
variables which might
influence where kangaroos are that would
include
vegetation time and the quality of the
vegetation closeness to water whether
they're stock present or not things like
that
and since we know those things because
we've measured them and observed them we
write those back to
what's occurring on a property and using
that information we can estimate the
distribution of kangaroos

what we're doing now is doing some
on-ground
surveys on individual properties we're
doing five properties and using a drone
and a thermal camera to measure the
abundance and distribution of kangaroos
on those properties
what we'll do is test the statistical
model that we developed with the broad
scale aerial survey with these
properties to see how close we can get
in theory it should work well no one's
done it before that's why we're
interested in doing this research and
it's also going to be a very useful tool
for land holders which have often
wondered how many kangaroos they have
they they don't have any reliable means
of calculating them
so
hopefully this will
go all the way to helping them
at any one property we might count eight
areas and and estimate the kangaroos and
the density within those areas and there
we
specifically choose them based on
different types of vegetation or
topography or something like that
and on in one night we might spend
six hours counting kangaroos and we'll
fire the drone as i said it has thermal
camera and we can measure the density of
kangaroos very accurately and the
thermal camera is excellent at picking
them up kangaroos are very hard to count
at other times of the
other times of the day and we found the
thermal camera to be an excellent tool
for to be to get very accurate numbers
relatively quickly
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they can log onto a web page
look at their property this is the idea
of it to look at their property at a
particular time and it will give them an
estimate based on what the conditions
are like at that time how many kangaroos
they're likely to have and where they
are likely to be in the environment on
their property
and with with that type of information
they'll be able to make decisions about
uh whether they need to
cull kangaroos or not whether they need
to look to get a commercial harvester or
not is there an issue with grazing
pressure caused by kangaroos or not
and so it's just another tool in their
total grazing pressure management
toolbox