Variable (abbr.) Description
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)