Costs and benefits of rabbit control options at the local level

Abstract

There are currently an estimated 40 million rabbits (Oryctolagus cuniculus) in Britain, causing £115 million of damage to the agricultural industry. It is estimated that £5 million are spent each year to manage rabbit populations. We report on a Decision Support System (DSS) to help landowners calculate the costs and benefits of managing the rabbit population on a field-by-field, or crop-by-crop, basis. The user builds a scenario of the key factors, including the threatened crop type, estimated rabbit population size and boundary length, from which the DSS estimates the likely loss in crop value utilising an underlying population model and calculated density/damage relationships for different crop types. The scenario can then be expanded to include different rabbit management measures, to determine the best methods. The cost of control is estimated and compared to the reduced level of damage, resulting in a cost – benefit analysis. As well as producing both text and graphical output, the DSS produces an audit trail of the key calculations for quality assurance purposes. The system is currently being field tested by UK agricultural advisors.

Keywords:

• Cost-benefit
• Decision Support System
• population management
• population model

Acknowledgements

This work was funded by the UK Department for Environment, Food and Agriculture (Defra). The authors would like to thank all those people who collected the data over the years, which is now used by the DSS.