Backyard bandicoots: community attitudes towards conservation planning in residential developments

ABSTRACT

As global populations grow, cities are stretching their urban boundaries into rural areas and bringing the challenges of biodiversity conservation into the backyards of homeowners. Planning controls can attempt to regulate residents’ behaviours to support conservation actions for threatened species but need to consider whether community attitudes align with conservation objectives. This study investigated community attitudes towards planned management interventions in a new conservation strategy designed to protect endangered Southern Brown Bandicoots in new residential estates around Cranbourne, Australia. A survey (n = 318, response rate 15.2 per cent) investigated current resident attitudes towards bandicoot conservation, cat ownership and effectiveness of current planning controls. Results indicate community support for a range of bandicoot conservation actions including confinement of domestic cats and non-lethal cat controls and for new developments being cat-free with bandicoot habitat corridors. Awareness of bandicoots correlated with higher support for conservation actions while cat owners were less supportive overall, particularly to limitations on cat ownership. Potential barriers to management interventions include inadequate knowledge, perceived associated risks and housing turnover. This information is valuable for conservation planning for new developments and to improve implementation of planning controls in existing residential areas for delivery of long-term protection for threatened species like Southern Brown Bandicoots.

KEYWORDS:

• Conservation actions
• urbanisation
• human behaviours
• cat ownership restrictions
• threatened species

Acknowledgements

The authors thank the School of Life and Environmental Sciences at Deakin University for supporting this study and the Centre for Integrative Ecology for funding support. We would also like to thank members of the Southern Brown Bandicoot Recovery Group, the Western Port Biosphere, staff from the City of Casey and Sarah MacLagan of Deakin University, and all of the residents who made this research possible by responding to our questionnaire.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Sera A. E. Blair http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8931-5081

Geoffrey Wescott http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9392-3319

Kelly K. Miller http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4360-6232

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported through a student grant from the Centre for Integrative Ecology, Deakin University.