Research has found that Kosciuszko National Park’s brumby population is likely to be on the rise
By Peter Hannam
Feral horse numbers in the Kosciuszko National Park were barely affected by last summer’s bushfires and are probably rising again, adding pressure to delicate alpine ecosystems, new research shows.
Research commissioned by the Invasive Species Council compared government horse-count data from 2019 with fire severity maps. About a third of the national park’s 690,000 hectares were burnt.
“This analysis shows that more than two-thirds of the area [of the park] with horses escaped the fires and about 16 per cent of the area with high horse numbers burnt at high or extreme severity,” the council’s report said.
“Ground and aerial observations in the months after the fires revealed large numbers of horses in most if not all of these areas,” it said.
“Recovery [from the fires] will be slow and surviving wildlife will have limited food and shelter in unburnt areas and will compete with or [preyed] on by feral animals,” it said.
Invasive Species Council’s conservation officer Candice Bartlett said that, as the horses were very mobile, most would have moved out of the way of the fires.
Click here to continue reading the article as it appears on the Sydney Morning Herald website.
Source: The Sydney Morning Herald
READ THE LATEST NEWS ARTICLES HERE
