About Koala Diaries

Koaladiaries.com.au provides a vital role in communication and education, and is a hub for community participation in saving the koala. Sign up as a member today, it is free.

Koala Diaries was a first in terms of integrating location intelligence technology with community engagement to record the occurrence of a single species in Queensland, and now does it nationally. It introduces world leading GIS technology from ESRI Australia to plot the points of crowdsourced (contributed by members of the public) koala sightings on a dynamic map. Koala sightings can be searched by time range, suburb, cause of death or injury, and other keywords.

We are working on overlays of other maps and datasets, animated timelines and more. The information gathered is available to all members - including government agencies, developers, utilities such as Ergon and Powerlink, and other stakeholders - to assist with policy making, sustainable infrastructure planning, and activities such as scientific research into koala disease and koala conservation.

Who are we?

It can't get any more grassroots than this... we have no funding, no organisational support, no political affiliation, no political agenda other than to do something that will engage the community and engender collaboration to save the koala. We are just two friends frustrated that the past two decades have seen the greatest decline in the koala population (both in numbers and health) since hunting ceased, without any good news on the horizon.

Co-founder of Koala Diaries | Carolyn Beaton

Website Creator, Co-founder of Koala Diaries | Alex Harris

When and how did Koala Diaries start?

It all began with some very hot days, and a few emails bouncing around the place early in 2009 showing photos of koalas in Adelaide reaching out, clearly asking for water (See the Hot Days photo gallery). These koalas are in South Australia where they do not hand-rear and release orphaned joeys; the implications could not be ignored. Who knew they did this?

It struck us just how little the general public - those of us who are not wildlife carers - know about this unique Australian animal. Most of us experience koalas from afar, looking up into the tree canopy while on a walk.  Most visitors only see them in zoos. The basic myths that have persisted for eons appear to be that they don’t drink water, sleep all day and get stoned at night on eucalyptus leaves. But these are myths!

The koala is most often the key reason for foreign tourists to visit Australia and is documented to be worth billions per year to the tourism industry nationwide. It is critical from an economic perspective alone, that we do everything possible to reverse the decline in the health and population of koalas everywhere.

We  thought that community engagement was the missing link. We sincerely believe that without educating and engaging the community as to the value of koalas to us all, we will see their extinction. In Queensland, this could be within the next two years. It would devastate our tourism industry, but also signal a far greater danger to our whole ecological balance.

But how can we save them when we don’t know enough about them? How can we save them when only a handful of dedicated carers and rescue teams are out there scraping them off the road, and the rest of us drive on by? How can we save them when, for all the research and vegetation mapping that has been done, we don’t have the answers to three basic questions:

We thought about how great it would be to share with the world just how communicative, smart, funny and affectionate koalas really are; to prove they are worthy of saving; to show that koalas are trying to live with us, regardless of whether we notice or not, and to graphically record the impacts of urbanisation and loss of habitat and increased disease. The seed for Koala Diaries and our first community project - a Koala Sighting Census - was sewn in April 2009. The website and census (launched in February 2010) were originally created for Queensland alone, but we were inundated with requests from people in other states.

Koala Diaries National Koala Sightings survey is now a national project, mapping the location of alive, injured and dead koalas, cause of death or injury and more. The value of this information in a single central database to koala conservation cannot be underestimated. So if you have seen a koala in the wild, please report it here. Every sighting will assist in forming more effective koala conservation policies Australia-wide.

Carolyn Beaton, Co-founder of Koala Diaries, Bob Irwin, life-long wildlife campaigner, and Alex Harris, Co-founder of Koala Diaries and website creator, at the launch of www.koaladiaries.com.au in February, 2010.

What are we hoping to achieve?

What we have found already is that the Queensland government's koala habitat maps in some areas bear almost no relationship to the whereabouts of koalas. That these habitat maps are the basis for infrastructure and urban development planning is a concern. The fact is, we have destroyed huge swathes of high value habitat, replacing it with housing estates, putting up fences and roads, introducing dogs and non-food trees into areas that once supported large populations of koalas. That this is now low-value habitat or no longer considered viable habitat is almost irrelevant, as koalas continue to live in these highly urban or intensively farmed environments. They have to travel further between limited food trees, across busy roads, through yards with dogs and swimming pools; they suffer stress and potentially higher incidence of disease. The risks are in some instances insurmountable.

We want people to understand this, to become aware of what these delightful animals are dealing with, and to become more aware of their surroundings, to look for and to look out for koalas, wherever they are.

Every sighting matters, even if recording the same koala. In some areas where the neighbourhood is aware of and watching koalas in their area, we have found they become familiar enough to name them. They can sometimes see if the koala is suffering from disease and call for help, and we have the koala rescue numbers on our website. It has made a huge difference in some areas to the driving habits of locals when they know there are koalas crossing specific roads. And we have an instance of an individual intervening to stop a council work crew from chopping down a food tree where a koala had been sighted - having them trim it instead.  

Koaladiaries.com.au may assist the community in identifying significant koala populations, 'at risk' populations, and potentially build an understanding of the home range movements of individual koalas where their location warrants special attention.  

How important is it for people to get involved and why?

People don’t realise how much of a difference the simple fact of awareness can make. We have made it incredibly easy to view and log koala sightings on the website, so even the technophobes can use Koaladiaries.com.au. If you don’t have a computer you can go to the library, or to a neighbour. In fact, get the neighbourhood, your gardening group, bushcare group, school or golf club involved and there will always be someone who can upload the sighting, and somewhere to view them. The value of the data collected is only as good as that entered, and we don’t know nearly enough about the current koala situation in the Western suburbs, in Western Queensland, or Western Australia. Every sighting counts.

The other thing we ask is, wherever possible get a photo. The photos we have received from people with mobile phones have been outstanding in terms of the moment captured. These koalas are real characters!

What else can we tell you about Koala Diaries?

Membership is free, and photos are available for non-commercial use with attribution to www.koaladiaries.com.au. We specifically allocated this kind of a license to the website with school children and community groups in mind.

Most rewarding is that the response has been almost overwhelming. You have to remember, we are just a couple of friends in Noosa who put this together in a matter of months on our own time and dime. More so than the thousands of visitors and members, and hundreds of sightings, some even pre-dating the Internet (not something we were expecting!), were the heartfelt thanks of carers and leading conservationists nationwide, for making such a difference in so short a time. They thank us for giving a voice to the reality of koala populations in high density urban environments, to koala populations in areas where we are told there are none, and for highlighting hot spots for koala movement that require monitoring. 

 

We hope this project continues to garner the support of researchers and conservation groups, government agencies, individuals and corporations, because the more information we get, the more detail with regard to sightings submitted, the more variety of geodata we obtain for overlays and mashups, the greater the outcomes in terms of analysis and learning. This is a beautifully designed system, that with the help of ESRI Australia, delivers a much needed functionality in our efforts to save the koala, and enjoins the community in those efforts.

Koala Diaries provides the tools to anyone and everyone who has ever thought, “what difference can I make?”, to make a tangible difference, because for each new  member of Koaladiaries.com.au, we prove a public that is interested, concerned and committed to saving the koala.

Alex Harris & Carolyn Beaton