Smith Deane, Waddell Kristy, Allen Benjamin L
Institute for Life Sciences and the Environment, University of Southern Queensland, Toowoomba, QLD 4350, Australia.
School of Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, Swinburne University of Technology, Hawthorn, VIC 3122, Australia.
Animals (Basel). 2020 Sep 1;10(9):1550. doi: 10.3390/ani10091550.
The global effort to conserve threatened species relies heavily on our ability to separate these species from the processes that threaten them, and a common tool used for this purpose is exclusion fencing. In Australia, pest animal exclusion fencing has been repeatedly used on conservation land on a small scale to successfully exclude introduced predators and competitors from threatened native fauna populations. However, in recent years, "cluster fencing" on agricultural land has re-emerged on a large scale and is used by livestock producers seeking to reduce predation losses by dingoes () and manage total grazing pressure from native and introduced herbivores, including red kangaroos (). Given that the primary threats to at-risk native fauna are also predation and overgrazing, there may be potential for cluster fencing on livestock land to achieve additional fauna conservation benefits. Understanding the amount, location and potential conservation value of cluster fenced livestock land is critical for determining how these areas might contribute to broader threatened fauna recovery goals. Drawing from publicly available databases maintained by the Australian Government, we assessed the spatial overlap of threatened species' distributions with 105 cluster fences erected in Queensland since 2013, which cover 65,901 km of land. These cluster fenced areas represent 18 biogeographic subregions and may contain 28 extant threatened mammals, birds and reptiles including 18 vulnerable species, 7 endangered species and 3 critically endangered species. An average of nine threatened species or their habitats were identified per cluster, and over three quarters (78.6%) of these species face at least one threat that is being mitigated within clusters. The true status of threatened and pest species within clusters is largely unknown or unrecorded in most cases, but some examples of pest eradication and threatened species recovery are already emerging. Given the vast size of the cluster fenced estate, the many different biomes and species that it represents and the nature of the threats being removed within these fenced areas, we contend that agricultural cluster fencing may offer an unprecedented opportunity to advance threatened fauna conservation goals for some species at scales previously thought impossible and should be a research priority for threatened species managers.
全球保护濒危物种的努力在很大程度上依赖于我们将这些物种与威胁它们的过程隔离开来的能力，而用于此目的的一种常见工具是隔离围栏。在澳大利亚，有害动物隔离围栏已多次在小规模的保护用地上使用，以成功地将引入的捕食者和竞争者与濒危的本地动物种群隔离开来。然而，近年来，农田上的“集群围栏”大规模重新出现，被牲畜养殖户用于减少澳洲野狗造成的捕食损失，并管理本地和引入的食草动物（包括红袋鼠）带来的总放牧压力。鉴于濒危本地动物面临的主要威胁也是捕食和过度放牧，牲畜用地上的集群围栏可能有潜力实现额外的动物保护效益。了解集群围栏牲畜用地的面积、位置和潜在保护价值，对于确定这些区域如何为更广泛的濒危动物恢复目标做出贡献至关重要。我们利用澳大利亚政府维护的公开数据库，评估了自2013年以来在昆士兰州竖立的105个集群围栏与濒危物种分布的空间重叠情况，这些围栏覆盖了65901平方公里的土地。这些集群围栏区域代表18个生物地理亚区域，可能包含28种现存的濒危哺乳动物、鸟类和爬行动物，其中包括18种易危物种、7种濒危物种和3种极度濒危物种。每个集群平均识别出9种濒危物种或其栖息地，其中超过四分之三（78.6%）的物种面临的至少一种威胁在集群内正在得到缓解。在大多数情况下，集群内濒危物种和有害物种的真实状况在很大程度上未知或未记录，但已经出现了一些根除有害物种和濒危物种恢复的例子。鉴于集群围栏区域面积巨大，它所代表的众多不同生物群落和物种，以及这些围栏区域内正在消除的威胁的性质，我们认为农业集群围栏可能为在以前认为不可能的规模上推进某些物种的濒危动物保护目标提供前所未有的机会，并且应该成为濒危物种管理者的研究重点。
