Drone technology is helping western NSW farmers ascertain grazing pressures caused by kangaroo numbers so they can better plan farm production.
A webinar is being broadcast on Wednesday May 11 by Western Local Land Services (LLS) (link below) showcasing the new technology trialled at five western NSW stations.
Fiona Garland, Team Leader kangaroo management, Western LLS, said the technology using drones was nearing proof of concept stage at the end of June. It is financed through the Future Drought Fund.
It was hoped the technology would be free to all graziers once it was ready. "The technology will also act to conserve and regenerate rangeland areas, " she said.
Initial trials showed the drone technology was backing up existing knowledge of kangaroo numbers - so it was very accurate.
A Matrice 300 drone is used with hi-res infra-red and colour rgb camera used to collect video footage. Infra-red enables night sampling - which is when most of the sampling took place.
They did about 180 minutues of flight time per night, covering around 36km of transect in calm conditions in the trial.
The LLS says grazing pressure from unmanaged herbivores such as kangaroos can significantly reduce the carrying capacity and ultimately the profitability and sustainability of livestock grazing in the rangelands, as well as contributing to longterm landscape degradation and reducing drought resilience.
"The non-domestic component of Total Grazing Pressure (TGP) transcends property boundaries and public/private infrastructure. No single entity or individual has landscape scale management influence. "Primary producers as a collective do, but they need tools that help them understand both the supply and demand aspects of this complex issue, and support decision making in managing available and future resources.
"Despite the significant grazing pressure that they exert on landscapes and agricultural enterprises, there are no predictive models that allow land managers to forecast the likely forage demands of kangaroos at a property or paddock scale. Existing kangaroo census information is collected at a regional scale only.
Some of the objectives of the project include:
. Contracting NSW Department of Primary Industries to develop a proof-of-concept model for predicting kangaroo density and resource use by kangaroos at a property or paddock scale.
. Testing the predictions of the models on a minimum of five properties in the Western region of NSW.
. Implementing an innovative extension and adoption of a plan exploring the issues and documenting the progress of the tool development.
"While the project must be completed by June 2022, it is hoped that the prototype tool could be further developed into a tool for primary producers to predict movement and local density of kangaroos (and potentially other generalist herbivores). This tool could be used in other decision-support systems across the Southern Rangelands of Australia which cover approximately 22 per cent of the Australian landscape."
The webinar can be accessed at this link .
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John Ellicott
journalist and author
journalist and author
