Data used to estimate animal abundance from Cunningham et al (2020) Ecology Letters

This data accompanies our 2020 publication in <i>Ecology Letters</i> titled, "<i>A native apex predator limits an invasive mesopredator and protects native prey</i><i>: Tasmanian devils protecting bandicoots from cats.</i>"<br>If you use these datasets, please cite the paper as well as this dataset. Please see the paper for a detailed description of the data and analysis.<br><br>Estimating abundance of feral cats<br>The four files beginning with "cats" are used together to estimate the abudance of feral cats at 28 study sites. <br>"cats_capture history.csv" is the capture history of each uniquely identifiable cat at each study site. <br><br>"cats_marked unidentified.csv" shows the number of detections at each study site of cats with pellage markings that we could not confidently assign to an individual. This usually occurred due to a poor or partial photo. <br><br>"cats_unmarked black cats.csv" shows the number of detections of unmarked cats at each study site. This was usually the case for cats that were completely black in colour. <br>"cats_site covariates.csv" shows site level covariates used in the mark-resight analysis. <br><br>Estimating abundance of other species<br>We estimated the abundance of the other species using either the Royle-Nichols model or the N-mixture model. In each case, we recorded species detections for each camera in five temporal periods. These detection histories are shown in the csv files that begin with the common name of a species. We did this for seven species. <br>The file titled "siteCovariates_nMixture_RoyleNichols.csv" is the site-level covariates used for these models. <br><br>We used two time-varying covariates, one for lure age and one for date: "lureAge.csv" and "dateCovariate.csv"<br>