A Comparison between Video and Still Imagery as a Methodology to Determine Southern Hairy-Nosed Wombat (Lasiorhinus latifrons) Burrow Occupancy Rates

While many people have great affection for southern hairy-nosed wombats, they are also considered by others to be an agricultural pest, because of the damage they can cause to farmland and agricultural infrastructure. Therefore, we need to have a good understanding of how many wombats there might be and how the population is changing, if we are to make properly informed decisions on how to best manage them. Unfortunately, because wombats are nocturnal and live underground, and because they use a number of different burrows throughout their home ranges, counting them can be difficult. We used motion-activated cameras to record how often wombats use each burrow in order to develop a reliable method of counting wombats that we can apply at the broad scale. We found that, on average, there are around 0.43 wombats for each active burrow. The use of video cameras to record this information provided a much simpler and less invasive means of researching wombat behaviour than methods such as trapping. However, video cameras do have limitations that need to be considered, and researchers need to fully understand their capabilities and limitations before employing them in the field