The Ecological Society of Australia congratulates Mr Patrick Finnerty on being awarded the 2021 Jill Landsberg Trust Fund Scholarship. Patt is a PhD candidate at the University of Sydney, within the School of Life and Environmental Sciences, investigating the use of plant odours to manipulate mammalian herbivore foraging behaviours as a conservational tool.

“Foraging is absolutely fundamental to animal fitness,” says Patt.

“It is also one of the most time-consuming activities, so there is formidable selective pressure for animals to forage efficiently and on high-quality plants in high-quality plant patches.”

However, until recently it was not well understood what information foragers like mammalian herbivores used to make decisions about finding food.

“It might seem quite a simple question,” says Patt, “but there was never a good explanation around how a kangaroo or a wallaby or any mammalian herbivore finds the food that it wants.”

To answer this question, research undertaken in the final year of his undergraduate degree allowed Patt and his colleagues to show that swamp wallabies in Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park near Sydney are able to find food sources through smell alone. Taking these findings, the team travelled to South Africa and demonstrated that the African elephant also uses smell to find and distinguish between preferred food choices.

“This enhanced the picture that smell is really important to mammalian herbivore foraging,” says Patt.

“Recently there has been this idea to use our knowledge about how animals behave and link this with how we can actually protect wildlife or conserve areas from threats.”

In Australia, and globally, problem herbivores have detrimental impacts on revegetation projects especially in post fire-recovery, causing millions of dollars of damage in forestry and agriculture and driving rare plants to extinction.

Patt’s PhD sees him return to the swamp wallabies of Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park to investigate whether herbivore behaviour can be manipulated by distorting the plant odour landscape. He predicts that introducing known low-preference plant odour cues (from both real plants and artificially produced odours mimicking these low-preference plants) will degrade the perceived net quality of a foraging patch, delay visits by herbivores and increase focal plant survival.

“This project will provide the first crucial step in answering the question of whether we can use plant odour to shift herbivore foraging patterns away from plants that we value,” says Patt.

In the longer term, Patt’s results may provide targeted, cheap and precise alternatives to lethal control or fencing for land managers wishing to protect ecologically or economically valuable plants from browsing damage by mammalian herbivores.

“I am hoping that my results will have tangible benefits helping to increase our capacity to protect revegetation programs and threatened plant species, reduce human-wildlife conflict and provide a novel and passive solution to reduce damage to crops in forestry, agriculture and in our gardens,” says Patt.

“We have to accept that it’s not a silver bullet and might have to be used in conjunction with other management methods but it gives another alternative to managing wildlife and protecting high-conservation areas.”

“Jill Landsberg made some outstanding contributions to the field of ecology, especially in the conservation of biodiversity in primary production landscapes. I am incredibly grateful to be receiving this scholarship under her name.”

The funding that Patt will receive as part of the Jill Landsberg Trust Fund Scholarship will be used to purchase greater numbers of seedlings and VOC diffusion vials, thereby increasing the replication of the trials and strengthening the power of the investigation.