Monitoring the possum eradication in Akaroa

Pest Free Banks Peninsula  have been working to remove possums since late 2022.

Grant has had a thermal camera at Akaroa operating since 2019 and before the work started was seeing more than one possum every night on average. That number started to drop in 2023 and in 2024 there was just one recording of a possum made. So far this year there have been zero. 

This is the analysis of over 24,000 recordings with 1,100 monitoring nights.

They're impressive results. Congratulations to the team for the results to date.

This also demonstrates the usefulness of the thermal camera for this type of outcome monitoring. Because the camera is sensitive, it see more than other monitoring techniques. That means you can have a higher confidence, more quickly. Because the AI does all the heavy lifting, and the results are all stored on the Cacophony servers the labour involved in doing the analysis is minimal. This means the monitoring is not only better, it's ultimately cheaper.