Life will return to normal for the region's koalas as threeyears of field work wrappedup for the Gunnedah koala research project this week.
A team of volunteers and researchers spent the last week locating and catching the 50 koalas fitted with radio tracking devices to remove the collars and conduct health checks before releasing them.
The tracking collars will be calibrated to obtain detailed data about the animals' movements over the last six months.
Liverpool Plains Land Management Committee chair David Walker said the committee would look at new means of funding to continue the study.
"Project funding goes for a specific amount of time to do various jobs. Those jobs are now being completed so the funding comes to an end," he said.
"What this study has shown, it's thrown up a whole lot of new questions, and they're really important questions, so we're going to be looking for more funding, but that's a whole new process."
For now, the project will focus on its "tree stage" funded by the Foundation for National Parks and Wildlife.
Senior principal research scientist Dan Lunney said it would involve overlaying GPS data with information regarding which specific trees the koalas choose to inhabit."
There are some botanists where the koalas were measuring the trees that they were in, the diameter, the height, the species,and a few other attributes of the trees," he said.
"We will be able to say as we add this picture of the koalas from where they're located to say 'these are the trees that the koalas are selecting in a particular sequence'."
Dr Lunney said the next phase of the work will be analysing all the data, followed by communication of the results.
He said the last three years had provided an interesting study period for the project."
By sheer chance we went from drought and intense heat waves to floods," he said.
"But what we're looking at is the long term impact. So we think there's a long term cycle of change where the populations can breed up and they get knocked back.
"Doing a long term study is always very hard on an animal that you can't see, that's low in numbers, and is iconic."
Dr Lunney said the project also involved a method a littleless glamorous - the study of koala dung or scats.
"The scat studies were a great innovation," he said.
"What we're doing now is radiotracking - we're going back to the trees to see where there are scats at the bottom, to what extent one validates the other, to what extent the radio tracking and the scats correspond, and therefore what extra layer of information we're getting from radio tracking.
"They're complementary, we do both.
"In a rural area where peopleare interested, people are willing to have you on their property and having researchers being here, it's something very interesting. And Gunnedah was an ideal place for this."
by Carmen McIntosh
