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La mise en œuvre du projet PROTEGE sur la thématique des EEE sur le Paysage Culturel Taputapuatea ne peut être garantie sans un appui en termes de sensibilisation et de communication. En effet, cela permettra une meilleure appropriation des actions de mise en œuvre de la gestion et de la restauration du site UNESCO par la population locale, et cela permettra également aux acteurs locaux de mieux agir sur cette thématique et de faire évoluer les pratiques à court, moyen et long terme afin de garantir l’intégrité du Bien et la reconduction du label UNESCO. La mission de sensibilisation va permettre d’informer les acteurs locaux sur les généralités des EEE et leurs moyens de lutte/éradication associés, et sur les EVP et leur conservation et restauration. Elle passera par des phases d’information, de connaissances, et d’actions pédagogiques, ludiques avec des visites et ateliers de terrain. L’élaboration du plan de sensibilisation place au cœur de sa stratégie des publics cibles auxquels sont associés : des objectifs et messages de sensibilisation, des moyens, et des outils/supports adéquats et adaptés aux publics cibles.

Rodents remain one of the most widespread and damaging invasive alien species on islands globally. The current toolbox for insular rodent eradications is reliant on the application of sufficient anticoagulant toxicant into every potential rodent territory across an island. Despite significant advances in the use of these toxicants over recent decades, numerous situations remain where eradication is challenging or not yet feasible. These include islands with significant human populations, unreceptive stakeholder communities, co-occurrence of livestock and domestic animals, or vulnerability of native species. Developments in diverse branches of science, particularly the medical, pharmaceutical, invertebrate pest control, social science, technology and defense fields offer potential insights into the next generation of tools to eradicate rodents from islands. Horizon scanning is a structured process whereby current problems are assessed against potential future solutions. We undertook such an exercise to identify the most promising technologies, techniques and approaches that might be applied to rodent eradications from islands. We highlight a Rattus-specific toxicant, RNA interference as species-specific toxicants, rodenticide research, crab deterrent in baits, prophylactic treatment for protection of non-target species, transgenic rodents, virus vectored immunocontraception, drones, self-resetting traps and toxicant applicators, detection probability models and improved stakeholder community engagement methods. We present a brief description of each method, and discuss its application to rodent eradication on islands, knowledge gaps, challenges, whether it is incremental or transformative in nature and provide a potential timeline for availability. We outline how a combination of new tools may render previously intractable rodent eradication problems feasible.

Rodent eradications undertaken on tropical islands are more likely to fail than eradications undertaken at higher latitudes. We report on 12 independent rodent eradication projects undertaken on tropical islands that utilized the results of an in situ bait availability study prior to eradication to inform, a priori, the bait application rate selected for the eradication. These projects also monitored bait availability during the eradication. The results from our analysis verified the utility of bait availability studies to future rodent eradication campaigns and confirmed the influence of two environmental factors that can affect bait availability over time: precipitation prior to the study and the abundance of land crabs at the study site. Our findings should encourage eradication teams to conduct in-depth assessments of the targeted island prior to project implementation. However, we acknowledge the limitations of such studies (two of the projects we reviewed failed and one removed only one of two rodent species present) and provide guidance on how to interpret the results from a bait availability study in planning an eradication. Study design was inconsistent among the twelve cases we reviewed which limited our analysis. We recommend a more standardized approach for measuring bait availability prior to eradication to provide more robust predictions of the rate at which bait availability will decrease during the eradication and to facilitate future comparisons among projects and islands.

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Reports from the PACC project

Technical report