University of Queensland Associate Professor Stephen Johnston has been working closely with common and southern hairy-nosed wombats, found across the southern parts of the country, for the past 13 years to better understand how they can help maintain endangered northern hairy-nosed wombat populations.

There are only 200 estimated northern hairy-nosed wombats left in the wild, with most at Epping Forest National Park near Clermont, Central Queensland.

"Our idea was that if we can understand the husbandry and reproduction biology of the southern hairy-nosed wombat, that would become a bit of a model for us to move onto the northern hairy-nosed wombat," Professor Johnston said.

His team have been working closely with captive wombats in zoos and not-for-profit organisations that handle orphaned wombats and collecting poo and urine samples to better understand their reproductive cycle.

"A lot of the effort we have put in so far is trying to develop techniques that non-invasively allow us to assess the animal...to work out the timing of when the females are ready to mate," he said.

"Wombats ... are these big old boys can get up to 40 kilograms and they can be quite aggressive.

"Rather than have to collect the blood sample which in the case of the wombat requires them to be anaesthetised ... this allows us to collect that sample and to assess what the hormones are doing and map the changes with the behaviour you are seeing."

Working alongside a not-for-profit organisation, Professor Johnston said they had managed to train wombats to urinate on command.

"More recently we have developed a procedure where the animals have been conditioned to urinate on command," he said.

"These (orphaned) animals were hand-raised and as part of that some are conditioned to toilet on command to keep their enclosures clean.

"So these animals basically, just by giving a gentle little rub on their rump, this is the signal we would use to toilet.

"We can actually collect a urine sample from these animals and there is hormone information in their urine."

Professor Johnston said knowing when female wombats were in heat could improve their reproductive rates in captive populations, which he called "insurance populations" for the species.

"When you establish those insurance populations you learn a lot about their basic biology, things where in the wild animal you can't get access to - a better understanding of general biology," he said.

"A lot of what we apply in understanding the ecology of a species in the wild has to be built upon a general understanding of how often can they breed, when are they sexually mature, are they seasonal breeders...all of that is difficult to get hold of in the wild situation and so having these captive populations allows us to build that information."

Researchers were also freezing wombat sperm to maintain the genetics of an individual across "theoretically hundreds of years".

"The reason we are trying to freeze it ... if you can store sperm for a long period of time it becomes a valuable resource you can use in the future," Professor Johnston said.

"You can store many animals in one small physical space. If an animal dies unexpectedly, you can recover the sperm."

Professor Johnston said the next step would be to artificially inseminate female wombats when they were in heat to improve chances of conception and establish genetic variability.

"We have put all this information together and now we are getting close to the point where we can start using some of this technology for specific purposes and ultimately we want to use them for the northern hairy-nosed wombat," he said.

"The idea would be that if we had a captive population of northern hairy-nosed wombats ??? that over a period of time they are going to run out of genetic variability if they just breed within themselves.

"Could transfer genetics between two populations ... by just transferring the frozen sperm rather than the whole animal (which would) give you reproductive and management options.

"What we want to do is maintain as much genetic diversity as possible to make sure there is enough...diversity within the population so they don't run into problems like inbreeding or become susceptible to diseases because of a lack of resistance they might have because of a lack of variability in genetics."

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