Harnessing citizen science to save the endangered Bogong Moth

At only about 2.5cm long and weighing less than a gram, Bogong Moths complete an epic 1,000km migration each year. They are found in every Australian state and territory, except for the Northern Territory, and from there head towards alpine regions in Victoria and New South Wales, where critically endangered Mountain Pygmy-possums are waking from their hibernation.

Bogong Moths are a crucial food source for Mountain Pygmy-possums but in recent years they have not been arriving at the alpine regions in the numbers needed, raising concern for the survival of the moths and leaving the Mountain Pygmy-possums without their primary food source.

Bogong Moth numbers dropped by an estimated 99.5 per cent in 2017-18, and the moths were subsequently listed as endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) in 2021.

This decline prompted a collaboration between Zoos Victoria and researchers at Federation's Centre for eResearch and Digital Innovation (CeRDI) to develop Moth Tracker – a multi-year citizen science platform to support research and conservation efforts.

Moth Tracker is hosted on the State Wide Flora and Fauna Teams (SWIFFT) platform, an online platform that enables members of the public to upload sightings of the Bogong Moth during their seasonal migration. Bogong Moth sightings inform research, providing researchers with data that can increase the understanding of the moth's migration. In turn, this can assist in the conservation of the moth and the possum by providing information such as the availability of food for the Mountain Pygmy-possum.

CeRDI Senior Research Fellow Dr Birgita Hansen says the dwindling moth numbers threaten the possums' survival.

"It's a different conservation situation because there is one threatened species relying on another species, which is also under threat," Dr Hansen said.

"The project is trying to understand where the moths are in the landscape, trying to understand the seasonality in the populations - where they are and what they're doing."

Moth Tracker gathers open-source real-time data on the dates, locations, and numbers of Bogong Moths that travel during the annual migration periods. It has a mandatory photo upload and records the time, day, and location of the sighting. Contact details of people submitting Moth Tracker sightings are not collected, only their names.

Many people may mistake Bogong Moths for much larger ones, so Zoos Victoria has included a simple but informative identification guide to help contributors distinguish them.

Dr Hansen says the site has been well-used by contributors from the start but more recently, there has been a big increase in sightings, with Zoos Victoria recently reporting more than 800 moth sighting submissions including 500 that were verified as Bogong Moth sightings.

Zoos Victoria Conservation Campaigner Estelle Van Hoeydonck is thrilled with these results.

"We are incredibly grateful to the many citizen scientists across Australia who have been looking out for Bogong Moths and contributing their sightings to Moth Tracker. In the six years since launching Moth Tracker, we have never seen such high numbers, and we encourage people to keep looking out for these special moths over the coming weeks."

New knowledge collected from Moth Tracker is being used to inform decision-making about future conservation and recovery efforts for both the Bogong Moth and the Mountain Pygmy-possum. Since 2006, Zoos Victoria has been involved in the recovery program for the small marsupial, which is native to south-eastern Victoria and southern New South Wales.

The project also highlights the value of the SWIFFT network, which is an independent community knowledge network managed by CeRDI and is open to anyone or any organisation interested in threatened species and biodiversity conservation.

"SWIFFT started as a community conversation where people got together to share information on threatened species in western Victoria," Dr Hansen said.

"It was a simple wiki page and was just for western Victoria. That was in the early 2000s, with video conferences running alongside it. It was all about knowledge sharing on threatened species in the region," Dr Hansen said.

"Then it extended beyond the region to encompass the whole state and the project came into CeRDI to refresh the website and make it more modern and accessible.

"It now has an online presence where people can interact with the information easier than what they could have done with a wiki."

SWIFFT has been supported by Helen Macpherson Smith Trust, the Department of Energy, Environment and Climate Action (DEECA), Zoos Victoria, the Ballarat Environment Network and Federation University. SWIFFT partners, participants and contributors include community environment and conservation groups, government agencies and authorities, education and research institutions, conservation organisations and landholders and managers.

The platform also hosts quarterly webinars, previously hosted by DEECA (Ballarat) and now hosted by CeRDI.

If you see a Bogong Moth or a moth you think could be a Bogong Moth, take a photo and upload it to Moth Tracker. It's quick and easy, and will help scientists better understand how to help the moths and if they will make it to the mountains this year. Learn more: https://www.zoo.org.au/moth-tracker/