INDEPENDENT WILD HORSE COUNT - ADDITIONAL AREA

My fundraiser on this platform, INDEPENDENT WILD HORSE COUNT, raised $78,260 that will be spent on engaging Airborne Logic P/L to undertake an aerial survey of wild horses in a large section of open terrain in the north of Kosciusko National Park. The imagery will be processed with artificial intelligence to accurately count the horses in the survey area. This will enable comparison of the numbers in the survey area to NPWS estimates for the same area.

NPWS undertake two types of horses surveys in KNP:

Annual spotting counts are undertaken by NPWS helicopter flying a meandering path over the open plains in a section of the KNP known as the Northern Block. Horse sightings are recorded by two human spotters, one on each site of the aircraft. While the methodology states that this method that it is known to underestimate population, many believe that it is a far more accurate method than distance sampling. What it certainly demonstrates is historical population distribution with in the survey area that can be used for statistical comparisons.

Stuart Cairn's has reported on horse populations in 2014, 2019, 2020, 2022 and 2023 and there has been many challenges to the integrity and accuracy of the results. Estimated populations are derived by applying mathematical formulas to data produced by NPWS. The physical survey is done by NPWS helicopter and staff flying parallel flight paths on average a few kilometres apart. The survey only records horses sighted within 150m each side of the aircraft so a 300m wide strip. Fancy maths follows by Carin's to estimate population in the remaining areas. The method is riddled with potential inaccuracies and bias.

These reports document that Cairn's estimates that the vast majority of horses in the KNP reside in an area known as the Northern Survey Block (being some 1200km2 in area) and further that more than 85% of those horses reside in a much smaller area being the open terrain of that block.

The survey that is already arranged will count horses is a large portion of that open terrain and statistically provide directly comparable data to the same areas in both the Cairn's surveys and the annual spotting counts. The funds from this new fundraiser will be spent on surveying the remainder of the open terrain in northern block which is essentially match the area covered by annual spotting counts.

Many supporters believe this will be the "nail in the coffin" and provide and even stronger comparison to both Carin's and annual counts.

This additional survey and data processing has not been fully costed and the team will be working on this as soon as possible. If you are not comfortable donating until a definite budget is set then hold off and keep a lookout for updates in the page.

However, with a massive aerial culling of horses proposed by NPWS from 7th February, time is of the essence so if you are comfortable donating please do. There are some third party fundraising initiatives in the wind and these will be promoted in updates on this platform. If anyone has ideas for initiatives, please get in touch.

All funds raised by this fundraiser will be spent on imagery and data processing of the open plains terrain not covered by the original project. In the very unlikely event that refunds are forced via the original fundraiser, then funds may also be used to top up any shortfall for that project and associated costs.

I strongly encourage donors to take information on social media with extreme caution as the original campaign has suffered from a coordinated mis-information campaign orchestrated by a very small rogue element. If you are not sure what is being proposed, ask here, not on social media as I wont be monitoring the various sites.

Time to get the rest done.