How do you muster 5,000 people to determine the impact of rabbits across Australia in 2009?

RabbitScan is a national community, schools and science challenge to raise awareness of the threat posed by rabbits. New data, especially the extent of rabbits across Australia is critical to create an evidence base to understand their current impact on the landscape and to plan control measures. RabbitScan is an unique national project aimed at engaging people in ‘scanning’ their landscape (school, farm, parkland, roadside reserves, ovals etc) for signs of rabbits and to load information and images into a national online spatial database.

The RabbitScan initiative was conceived by the Invasive Animals Cooperative Research Centre and Rabbit Management Advisory Group. Spatial Vision has established an interactive web mapping site for people to record their scans. The web mapping application is designed to capture consistent survey results into a database to enable the production of a national map to be used by science and regional NRM organisations. The web mapping application is built over Google Maps.

Given the potential speed of environmental changes associated with climate change, engaging the community in mapping natural resource issues may become a critical means to gather timely information to support decisions on the future for natural resources.

This paper outlines the rationale for RabbitScan and will review preliminary outcomes of the map-based survey and lessons learnt from conducting a national community engagement approach to this issue.