Wildlife groups are leading a push to change NSW’s koala protection plans after discovering compelling evidence of unrecognised koala populations in Sydney’s northwest. That is according to ABC News, which reports that The Hills-Hornsby Rural Koala Project found 14 koalas in a 600-hectare area in Genorie and Maroota in The Hills District.
Lilly Schwartz from the Koala Project said a new report confirmed the group’s photographic and aural evidence of koalas in their area: “It puts a very strong case forward for a breeding population that exists here permanently,” Ms Schwartz said. “We’ve also got proof of multiple female koalas through our community reports. It’s great to know that those small amounts of reports we’re getting from the community represent a population.”
Bushfires that scorched much of the region in December 2002 were understood to have left little hope for koala populations. However, Ms Schwartz sought to prove otherwise, and her project found its first solid photo evidence of a koala at Glenorie within a year of kicking off in 2018.
Animal rescue group WIRES funded the most recent count, with Landcare Australia and QUT also involved in the study: “This is a region that, in a lot of cases, people have deemed not to be suitable for a koala population,” Katie Selhorst from Landcare Australia said. “This data shows that koalas are within the region and that this region is important just because koalas are there.”
Landcare Australia’s WildSeek project had previously confirmed a larger-than-expected koala population in the Sutherland Shire. Since May 2022, koalas have been considered endangered under the state’s Biodiversity Conservation Act.
CSIRO: Aussie Koala Numbers Are 10x Higher Than Estimate
In July, Wood Central exclusively revealed that Australia’s koala population – listed as “Endangered” in Queensland, New South Wales and the ACT since 2022 – is far larger than estimated, thanks to groundbreaking data released by the CSIRO.
Published as part of the CSIRO’s National Koala Monitoring Programme (NKMP), which has, since 2023, used expert data rather than expert opinion to calculate Koala abundance and disturbance.
And the results are surprising, with the CSIRO estimating the current population range between 287,830 and 628,010, about ten times more than the numbers forecast by the Australian Koala Foundation (between 32,000 and 58,000 in 2021 after the Australian Black Summer bushfires).
In effect, the number of koalas is now higher than in 2012 (forecast to be 144,000 to 605,000), when koala populations were classified as “vulnerable” and not “endangered.”
Whilst solely data-driven estimates have challenges—namely limited and fragmented data—the CSIRO states that they “have two distinct advances” over past estimates: “The first of these was a concerted effort to collate koala presence, absence, and abundance data from a wide range of sources (individuals, research organisations, community groups, local governments, and state governments). The second “is an analytical framework combining all these disparate sources and data types.”
