This report summarises the social research done for the Invasive Animals Cooperative Research Centre project: ‘Measuring the social, environmental and economic impacts of vertebrate pests’. The project aimed to:
- identify gaps in an earlier estimate of the social cost of invasive animals to Australia (Counting the Cost, by Ross McLeod 2004)
- develop an improved framework for assessing social costs or impacts
- conduct a case study of the social impacts of invasive animals in one district.
The case study of the Upper Hunter Valley in New South Wales set out to identify, understand, and possibly quantify the social impacts of invasive animals in an area with a typical range of land uses. We found that in the Upper Hunter region, wild dogs, foxes, feral pigs and rabbits, and to a lesser extent, feral goats and carp are seen as the main pest animals. In practice, only wild dogs, foxes and feral pigs currently seem to be causing concern for local landowners and resource managers.
|Author||Gerard Fitzgerald and Roger Wilkinson|
|Publisher||Invasive Animals Cooperative Research Centre|
|ISBN/ISSN||Web ISBN: 978-0-9805996-0-2|
|Region||Australia - national|