Australia has the highest recent extinction rate in the world and our desert mammals have been disproportionately affected. Rewilding seeks to restore threatened mammal species to areas where they are locally extinct whilst also reinstating important ecosystem processes. This talk will highlight some of the successful rewilding programs in Australia and the methods used to return native mammals to parts of their former range. Novel pest control tools, accelerated natural selection and conservation fencing will also be discussed as well as some of the future challenges and opportunities for rewilding.
Our speaker, A/Prof Katherine Moseby, is a Conservation Biologist at the University of New South Wales, and focusses on applied research and on ground action. She lives and works in Australia’s arid and semi-arid zones and her research interests include ecosystem restoration, facilitating co-existence of native species and introduced predators, and improving reintroduction success of threatened species. Katherine has co-founded four on-ground conservation research partnerships including Arid Recovery in SA and Wild Deserts in NSW. She partners with universities, governments, industry groups and NGOs on a range of conservation and restoration projects that include pest control, conservation translocations, exclusion fencing and threatened species recovery.