Best-practice management of feral cats and red foxes

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Best-practice management of feral cats and red foxes

Project start date: 18/07/2022
Project end date: 31/12/2026
NESP funding: $194,504 (GST-exclusive)

Feral cats and red foxes inflict unsustainable damage on many of Australia’s threatened species but land managers lack clear guidance on how to implement best-practice management of these pests.

Feral cats are inflicting unsustainable damage on threatened species. Photo: Northern Territory Government.

The Australian Government’s Threatened Species Action Plan 2022–2032 identifies best-practice management of cats and foxes in its Targets 8 and 9, so it is urgent that land managers, especially those focused on priority species and priority places, have clear guidance on how to plan, implement and review their programs.

Research into feral-cat management is active in most Australian states and territories, so the project is working with expert practitioners to describe the elements that constitute best-practice management of feral cats and red foxes for a range of functional groupings (e.g. by ecoregion and management problem). The project is also collaborating with these experts to clearly identify vital knowledge gaps that should become the focus for research that is improving feral-cat and red-fox management outcomes.

The project is being conducted in 2 discrete phases:

a focused, proof-of-concept workshop for feral-cat management with members of the National Feral Cat Taskforce, key hub researchers and other selected expert practitioners from across Australia
developing an online decision tool for feral-cat managers, via an expert-elicitation process.

The 2-step process above will then be repeated for red-fox management.

Key research areas

To address this challenge and equip land managers with information and tools for best-practice management of feral cats and red foxes, this project aims to support research users by:

establishing a working group of expert practitioners to describe the elements that constitute best-practice management of feral cats and red foxes
improving engagement with Indigenous land managers for the management of feral cats and foxes, particularly to broaden the understanding of best-practice management and to identify research gaps that would improve future management across a wider area
assessing the key knowledge gaps that would support improved best-practice management
engaging with natural-resource management groups to ensure tools are designed to meet the needs of on-ground managers
creating a decision-support tool for the management of feral cats and red foxes in Australia.

Our third workshop brought 13 experts together to quantify the effectiveness of different fox management scenarios, including those involving combinations of available management tools.

Experts had experience in research and management, and were drawn from Australian Universities, Government, and organisations with a conservation focus. Two observers with a strong professional awareness of issues relating to fox management also attended the workshop and contributed to discussions.

Following the IDEA protocol (Investigate, Discuss, Estimate, Aggregate; Hemming et al. 2018), experts completed an online survey, discussed the results and then completed another survey. The surveys quantified the predicted outcomes of 28 different management scenarios, comprised of aerial baiting, ground baiting or canid pest ejectors, either used alone or in combination with leghold trapping and shooting.

Workshop participants were also asked to identify and prioritise key challenges and research gaps in Australia’s fox management. Experts identified 13 key challenges and agreed that the greatest of these were: 1) securing adequate funding for long-term management, 2) maintaining long-term programs, 3) measuring the effectiveness, impacts and benefits of management, 4) managing foxes across tenures, and 5) achieving and maintaining social licence.

Among 24 knowledge gaps identified by the group, it was agreed that the most pressing concerns are: 1) identifying effective reduction targets, 2) measuring outcomes for native fauna, 3) enabling wildlife to persist with foxes, 4) methods for creating integrated management programs, and 5) the influence of conspecifics, habitat, and environmental conditions on management impact.

To improve the development of the fox management decision-tool, the report recommends the results be combined with those from additional surveys and interview with experts who were unable to attend the two-day workshop. .