Document ID: chunk:federal_register_of_legislation:F2023L01712:body:0:p23
Version: federal_register_of_legislation:F2023L01712
Segment Type: other
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Character Range: 65191–68100

of this habitat remains occupied. Population estimates are therefore minimums. However, as most of the remote and inaccessible unsurveyed areas between known subpopulations have been ravaged by unsuitable fire regimes, we are not overly optimistic of finding significant regional subpopulations.

  Population Trends
  There is no national population monitoring program for Tjakura and no ongoing standardised trend monitoring for this species. Nevertheless, annual Tjakura burrow monitoring programs have been conducted at both UKTNP and Yulara since 2002, Newhaven Wildlife Sanctuary since 2015, Kiwirrkurra IPA since 2017 and another site in the Great Sandy Desert in WA since 2017. These monitoring programs range from meandering searches of specific sites of varying sizes to tightly controlled surveys where a defined set of straight lines are walked in parallel throughout large sites of equivalent area (Table 2).

  Results of the monitoring programs have shown stable or increasing population trends at sites where both ongoing fire management and strategic cat control have been conducted, but declines where cats have not been managed. As most subpopulations outside the intensively monitored sites are not managed
  for predators, we assume there has been an overall

  decreasing population trend across the global population between 2001 and 2021. However, the positive response to the combined management of fire and cats at three sites gives us hope that we can change the trajectory of a declining Tjakura population if we can extend the number of sites where both fire and cats are effectively managed.

  The longest running monitoring programs have shown major subpopulation fluctuations at UKTNP since 2001 following the impacts of wildfires, but a stable to increasing trend at Yulara over the period 2001-2021. At UKTNP nine irregularly shaped sites of varying size (some up to several square kilometers in area), were surveyed annually until 2017 (Hauselberger, 2017), and at Yulara eleven smaller sites (300m x 200m) have been surveyed annually (Paltridge and Eldridge 2021).

  There appears to have been a decline in number of active burrows in UKTNP since 2012 (Bennison and West 2018). Whereas number of active burrows had started to recover at UKTNP within two years of
  the 2002 fire, there was no such recovery detected between 2012 and 2017. However, as the post-fire decline coincided with the end of the consistent monitoring by a single observer, the long-term impact of the 2012 fires remains unclear.

  In contrast, monitoring at Yulara has revealed an increasing subpopulation of Tjakura over the past two decades since the fires of the early 2000s (Paltridge and Eldridge 2021). Although nine of eleven monitoring sites have been affected by fire at some stage during the 20 years of monitoring, the network of tracks and presence of a full-time fire control team at