Laying low: Rugged lowland rainforest preferred by feral cats in the Australian wet tropics ...

• Main Authors: Bruce, Tom, Williams, Stephen, Amin, Rajan, L’Hotellier, Felicity, Hirsch, Ben
• Format: Dataset
• Language: English
• Published: Dryad 2022
• Subjects: FOS Biological sciences; camera-trap; Feral cat; occupancy modeling; Canis lupus
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.5061/dryad.2v6wwpzq4; https://datadryad.org/stash/dataset/doi:10.5061/dryad.2v6wwpzq4

Invasive mesopredators are responsible for the decline of many species of native mammals worldwide. Feral cats have been causally linked to multiple extinctions of Australian mammals since European colonisation. While feral cats are found throughout Australia, most research has been undertaken in arid habitats, thus there is a limited understanding of feral cat distribution, abundance, and ecology in Australian tropical rainforests. We carried out camera-trapping surveys at 108 locations across seven study sites, spanning 200 km in the Australian Wet Tropics. Single-species occupancy analysis was implemented to investigate how environmental factors influence feral cat distribution. Feral cats were detected at a rate of 5.09 photographs/100 days, 11 times higher than previously recorded in the Australian Wet Tropics. The main environmental factors influencing feral cat occupancy were a positive association with terrain ruggedness, a negative association with elevation, and a higher affinity for rainforest ... : General camera deployment 108 Camera-trap pairs were placed along main roads, four-wheel-drive tracks, and walking trails with one camera-trap facing into the road and another camera-trap positioned in the habitat, 50 m perpendicular from the road. To test the hypothesis feral cats would be more likely to use roads in tropical forests we placed a camera in the forest. A length of 50m was used to counteract potential spatial avoidance by feral cats of habitat features favoured by dingoes (Canis lupus dingo), the apex predator in Australia (Fancourt et al., 2019). We treated both cameras, on-road and off-road, as a single site for analyses due to their proximity to one another. Each camera-trap pair's planned location was spaced 2.2 km along the road; this distance exceeded the predicted home range of 1.16 km for feral cats in productive, low seasonality environments like rainforests and matched the home-range estimate of female feral cats in a montane rainforest in Hawaii (Bengsen et al., 2016; Smucker et ...