Replication Data for: Novel frontier in wildlife monitoring: identification of small rodent species from faecal pellets using Near-Infrared Reflectance Spectroscopy (NIRS) ...
Small rodents are prevalent and functionally important across the world’s biomes, making their monitoring salient for ecosystem management, conservation, forestry and agriculture. There is a growing need for cost-effective and non-invasive methods for large-scale, intensive sampling. Fecal pellet co...
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DataverseNO
2023
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| Online Access: | https://dx.doi.org/10.18710/9qkuiq https://dataverse.no/citation?persistentId=doi:10.18710/9QKUIQ |
| Summary: | Small rodents are prevalent and functionally important across the world’s biomes, making their monitoring salient for ecosystem management, conservation, forestry and agriculture. There is a growing need for cost-effective and non-invasive methods for large-scale, intensive sampling. Fecal pellet counts readily provide relative abundance indices, and given suitable analytical methods, feces could also allow for determination of multiple ecological and physiological variables, including community composition. In this context, we developed calibration models for rodent taxonomic determination using fecal near-infrared reflectance spectroscopy (fNIRS). Our results demonstrate fNIRS as an accurate and robust method for predicting genus and species identity of five co-existing subarctic microtine rodent species. We show that sample exposure to weathering increases the method’s accuracy, indicating its suitability for samples collected from the field. Diet was not a major determinant of species prediction accuracy ... |
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