Spatially explicit power analysis reveals challenges for a long-term threatened species monitoring program in Australia

Long-term monitoring programs are crucial to assess trends in biodiversity, and so make informed decisions for conservation and resource management. However, disregarding the statistical power of a monitoring program can lead to incorrect conclusions about species population trends, potentially resulting in ineffective management and misdirected resource allocation. In Australia, predation by introduced red foxes (Vulpes vulpes) and feral cats (Felis catus) remains a major cause of native faunal decline and extinction. Australia spends more than $16 million yearly in controlling foxes for biodiversity conservation, primarily through landscape-scale poison baiting. Using a long-term fox baiting and threatened species monitoring program in south-eastern Australia, we collated data from 2,132 camera-trap deployments to: (1) explore drivers of the distribution of threatened native mammals and introduced predators, (2) conduct a spatially explicit power analysis to assess the program's abili..., , # Spatially explicit power analysis reveals challenges for a long-term threatened species monitoring program in Australia

Dataset DOI: [10.5061/dryad.80gb5mm4h](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.80gb5mm4h)

## Description of the data and file structure

We use a long-term threatened species monitoring and predator management program conducted over 18 years in south-east Australia as a case-study to: (1) explore the drivers affecting the distribution of threatened native mammals and introduced predators, (2) conduct a spatially explicit power analysis to evaluate the statistical power of the monitoring program to detect changes in species occupancy over time, and (3) develop recommendations for improving monitoring effort by assessing alternate realistic monitoring scenarios. The study was conducted in Glenelg in SE Australia where Glenelg Ark Program was set up in 2005 to facilitate the recovery of native mammals from predation by foxes.

We collated data from multiple camera-trap studies ..., ,