Recent validation updates enhance warren detection in semi-arid landscapes, highlighting monitoring potential.
Recent field sampling and expanded ground validation have improved the accuracy of detecting southern hairy-nosed wombat (Lasiorhinus latifrons) and European rabbit (Oryctolagus cuniculus) warrens from open-source satellite imagery. This update to our earlier assessment incorporates a larger set of field-validated sites and demonstrates higher confidence in distinguishing between wombat and rabbit warrens across a semi-arid landscape. In addition, the availability of more recent high-resolution imagery in Google Earth has enabled the observation of individual burrow entrances within large rabbit warrens, a capability not evident during our initial study. This finding indicates that the detectability of burrowing structures may increase in parallel with ongoing improvements in publicly accessible remote-sensing data. Collectively, these results highlight the growing potential for cost-effective, broad-scale monitoring of burrowing mammals using open-source satellite imagery, while also emphasising the value of ongoing field validation as the resolution and coverage of imagery improve.
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McPherson et al. (2026) studied this question.
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