Electric vehicles could become an important tool for working in the bush, whether for wildlife conservation, tourism or primary production. To trial them, we commissioned an EV mechanic to customise an old Suzuki EVNorth.

Science is giving native wildlife a fighting chance against feral cats with two research programs at Arid Recovery named today as finalists for the 2020 Eureka Awards, the ‘Oscars’ of Australian Science. Arid Recovery’s research program is punching above its weight in being named two of three finalists in the Applied Environmental Research category.

After waiting through an achingly long 24 months of drought, solid rain fell this weekend – 50 mm of the glorious stuff.Our very first task is to check the fence. In a landscape where rain is so infrequent, and especially with less vegetation covering the ground at the moment, when water does move it can flow really fast and erode washouts under the fence. 

In May of 2018, Arid Recovery reintroduced 12 western quolls (Dasyurus geoffroii) to the reserve. In June and July 2018 they successfully bred and thirty offspring were born to five females. But who were the fathers of those offspring? That’s where I came in. I studied the parentage of the first generation of quolls born at Arid Recovery for my Honours project at the University of Adelaide, Supervised by Jeremy Austin, Katherine Moseby and Melissa Jensen.

To give drought relief to animals at the Arid Recovery Reserve we have been making and putting out ‘water fountains’. With the awful bushfire crisis raging across the country, there has been a lot of interest in these cheap and simple watering units so we’re sharing instructions on how to make them. These water fountains are not an ‘everyday’ measure.