Abstract
Increasing human population size and the concomitant expansion of urbanisation significantly impact natural ecosystems and native fauna globally. Successful conservation management relies on precise information on the factors associated with wildlife population decline, which are challenging to acquire from natural populations. Wildlife Rehabilitation Centres (WRC) provide a rich source of this information. However, few researchers have conducted large-scale longitudinal studies, with most focussing on narrow taxonomic ranges, suggesting that WRC-associated data remains an underutilised resource, and may provide a fuller understanding of the anthropogenic threats facing native fauna. We analysed admissions and outcomes data from a WRC in Queensland, Australia Zoo Wildlife Hospital, to determine the major factors driving admissions and morbidity of native animals in a region experiencing rapid and prolonged urban expansion. We studied 31,626 admissions of 83 different species of native birds, reptiles, amphibians, marsupials and eutherian mammals from 2006 to 2017. While marsupial admissions were highest (41.3%), admissions increased over time for all species and exhibited seasonal variation (highest in Spring to Summer), consistent with known breeding seasons. Causes for admission typically associated with human influenced activities were dominant and exhibited the highest mortality rates. Car strikes were the most common reason for admission (34.7%), with dog attacks (9.2%), entanglements (7.2%), and cat attacks (5.3%) also high. Admissions of orphaned young and overt signs of disease were significant at 24.6% and 9.7%, respectively. Mortality rates were highest following dog attacks (72.7%) and car strikes (69.1%) and lowest in orphaned animals (22.1%). Our results show that WRC databases offer rich opportunities for wildlife monitoring and provide quantification of the negative impacts of human activities on ecosystem stability and wildlife health. The imminent need for urgent, proactive conservation management to ameliorate the negative impacts of human activities on wildlife is clearly evident from our results.
Highlights
The stability of entire ecosystems is compromised through the process of urban expansion and global population growth, which both continue to increase at unprecedented rates [27]
We studied 31,626 native animal admissions to the Australia Zoo Wildlife Hospital (AZWH), a large Wildlife Rehabilitation Centres (WRC) in Beerwah, Queensland, Australia, and the outcomes of those admissions, from January 2006 to December 2017
We observed a steady increase in the number of admissions to AZWH that mirrors the increasing human population in the corresponding area
Summary
There is substantive evidence to suggest that anthropogenic factors are having devastating consequences on native fauna, both in Australia [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9] and internationally [10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26]. Global population growth contributes to the destruction, modification and fragmentation of wildlife habitat, reduced genetic diversity, threats from pathogens, the spread of exotic and invasive species, air, noise and light pollution, alteration in natural hydrologic and fire regimes, and a rapidly changing climate [33,34,35,36,37] The consequences of these environmental changes for most species include a reduced ability to forage, reduced prey or food availability, altered immune function, and diminished breeding success [38,39,40,41,42,43,44,45]. Changes to any of these life traits can compromise the persistence of native fauna populations in the wild
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