Habitat structure facilitates coexistence of native and invasive mesopredators in an Australian tropical savanna
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Context The introduction of the cat (Felis catus) to Australia has been a key driver of the decline and extinction of the continent’s endemic mammals. Currently, there is no clear long-term solution to controlling feral populations of cats at a landscape scale. As such, understanding how environmental conditions and habitat attributes can mediate the coexistence between introduced predators and native mammals can improve management outcomes for threatened species. Aim We sought to compare the differences in habitat use by feral cats and a remnant population of the endangered northern quoll (Dasyurus hallucatus) to understand what environmental variables allow these two mesopredators to coexist in tropical savanna of Cape York Peninsula, Queensland. Methods We deployed grids of motion-activated cameras three times per year over a 3-year period, across Eucalyptus tetrodonta-dominated plateaux known to be inhabited by feral cats and northern quolls. We modelled the spatial variation in the frequencies of detection of feral cats and northern quolls (referred to as ‘habitat use’), as a function of biotic and abiotic environmental variables by using a generalised linear model for consistent variables and a generalised linear mixed-effect model for fluctuating variables. Key results Habitat use by feral cats was most frequent in areas with high fire frequencies and low tree basal area, whereas habitat use by northern quolls was most frequent in areas of high basal area of E. tetrodonta (a commonly used den tree species), topographic ruggedness, and long-unburnt savanna. Conclusions Frequent fires in tropical savanna promote habitat use by feral cats and can result in a reduction of critical habitat for northern quolls. Implications We postulate that remnant populations of northern quolls on Cape York Peninsula occur in less frequently burnt refugia, primarily on top of plateaux that support high-biomass tropical savanna dominated by E. tetrodonta. Our findings highlighted that threatened mammals can persist alongside introduced predators in tropical savanna but are dependent on the maintenance of structurally complex habitat.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".