Detection |
Detection |
Camera placement (CP) |
Cameras were placed on trails (i.e.
well-established gamepads or discontinued walking trails/vehicle tracks,
N = 7), or off trails in bushland (N = 23). |
Age of lure (AoL) |
Mean (x̄) number of days (per survey period) since
lures were replaced. Lure freshness can influence the detectability of
some species, particularly predators (Mills et al. 2019). Lures
were replaced at the start of surveys 1, 2, and 3. Due to site access
issues, lures were replaced x̄ 26 days into survey 4 (when the lures were
x̄ 90 days old. The lures were not replaced for the remainder of the
experiment, meaning that lures were x̄ 38 days old at the start survey
5. |
Fire History |
Fire History |
Time since fire (TSF) |
Number of years since the site was last burnt by
prescribed or wildfire (i.e., prior to the 2019 prescribed fire) (DEECA
2020). |
Number of fires (NoF) |
Number of fires (incl. prescribed and wildfire)
that have affected each site within the last 100 years, prior to the
2019 prescribed fire (DEECA 2021a). |
2019 Prescribed Fire |
2019 Prescribed Fire |
Before-after (BA) |
Before cf. after prescribed fire. Two surveys
pre-fire, three surveys post-fire. |
Treatment (CI) |
Burnt cf. unburnt. 12/30 sites were burnt by the
prescribed fire. |
Fire extent (FireExt) |
The percentage of burnt area at each site within
a 100 m radius of the camera (approx. 3-ha). All sites had a value of
0% for the first two (pre-fire) surveys. |
Vegetation |
|
Vegetation type (VT) |
One of four categories: lowland forest, heathy
woodland, swampy riparian woodland, or dry forest. We created these
categories from condensing ecologically similar ecological vegetation
classes. VT reflects species’ food and shelter requirements (Swan et al.
2015; Norton et al. 2015; Lees et al. 2022). |
Normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) |
NDVI is a remotely
sensed measure of vegetation productivity that is positively related to
photosynthetic activity, green leaf biomass, fraction of green
vegetation cover, and primary productivity (Tucker et al. 1986;
Myneni et al. 1995). NDVI ranges from -1 to +1. We used the mean
monthly NDVI within 50 m of each site. NDVI is a widely-used metric for
quantifying the health and density of vegetation which can be a useful
predictor of mammal occurrence (Campbell‐Jones et al.
2022). |
Topography |
|
Topographic position index (TPI) |
A measure of the relative height of
each camera site (i.e., topographic ruggedness) compared to the terrain
within 100 m, derived from a DEM at 10 m resolution. For example, a TPI
value of -35 indicates that the location is 35 m lower in height than
the average height in the surrounding 100 m. TPI can represent site
productivity, which influences occurrence of some mammal species (Moore
et al. 2019). TPI was preferred over elevation as a topographic
variable, due to the modest elevational gradient in the eastern
Otways. |
Anthropogenic Features |
Anthropogenic Features |
Distance nearest township (DNT) |
The Euclidean distance (m) from each
site to the nearest mapped township (DEECA 2021b) and farmland (DEECA
2021c). |
Distance nearest farm (DNF) |
|
Prey Activity |
|
Small mammal (SM) |
Detections of SM (<2 kg) and LM
(>2 kg) per site, standardised for survey effort. Mammalian
prey availability can influence feral cat and red fox activity patterns
(McGregor et al. 2014). |
Large mammal (LM) |
|