A rebuttal to 'Mooted extinction of koalas at Eden : improving the information base'

The beginning of woodchipping operations near Eden in New South Wales (NSW) in 1968 marked the onset of one of Australia's most prolonged and bitter land-use conflicts. In a review of the Eden woodchip debate from 1987 to 2004, Lunney (2005) found that the koala was the most frequently mentioned animal in the newspaper media. Debate over its status is likely to continue, particularly as it remains a species in rapid decline in NSW, where it faces a suite of new and existing threats (Santika et al. 2014, 2015; McAlpine et al. 2015; Adams-Hosking et al. 2016). This Response addresses the interpretations in Jurskis' (2017) paper, 'Mooted extinction of koalas at Eden: improving the information base', submitted as a Comment on our Wildlife Research paper, 'Extinction in Eden: identifying the role of climate change in the decline of the koala in south-eastern NSW' (Lunney et al. 2014).