Simpson Desert Remote camera trap data

Remote camera traps: To survey the predators and their rodent prey, we placed 25 remote cameras (24 Moultrie i40 and one Reconyx Rapid- Fire) 110 km apart next to access tracks in spinifex habitat in the interdune swales. Two years of continuous monitoring were required to capture any lag (up to 12 months, see above) in changes in predator numbers following irruptions of prey (Fig. S1). Cameras were mounted atop 1.5-m-high metal stakes, and angled at ~10° so the field of view covered the track; their locations were assumed to be independent (spatial autocorrelation, Moran's dingo I = 0.15, P = 0.22; red fox I = 0.31, P = 0.14; feral cat I = 0.33, P = 0.06). Cameras were active from April 2010 to April 2012 and downloaded 34 times a year. Each photograph was tagged with the site name, camera identification number, download trip, moon phase, species and number of individuals recorded, and the tags written to the exif data of each file (jpeg) using EXIFPro 2.0 (Kowalski and Kowalski 2012). EXIFPro 2.0 was used to database the photographs and export the exif data as a text file for analysis. To ensure independence, a delay of 1 min was programmed on-camera between each trigger, and multiple photographs of the same presumptive individual (photographs taken <2 min apart) were removed prior to analysis. This resulted in a total of at least 3 min between photographs. Histograms were inspected for each species to confirm that this was an appropriate breakpoint.