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1. Introduced carnivores are often cryptic, making it difficult to quantify their presence in ecosystems, and assess how this varies in relation to management interventions. Survey design should thus seek to improve detectability and maximize statistical power to ensure sound inference regarding carnivore population trends. Roads may facilitate carnivore movements, possibly leading to high detectability. Therefore, targeting roads may improve inferences about carnivore populations. 2. We assessed our ability to monitor feral cats Felis catus and red foxes Vulpes vulpes on-and off-road, with explicit consideration of the location of monitoring sites on our ability to detect population changes. We also assessed whether there was evidence of spatial or temporal interaction between these species that might influence their roaduse. 3. Surveys were conducted in a conservation reserve in southeastern Australia between 2016 and 2018. At each of 30 sites, we deployed two motion-sensor cameras, one on-road, and the other off-road. Using occupancy models, we estimated cat and fox occupancy and detectability, and conducted a power analysis to assess our ability to detect declines in occupancy under three monitoring regimes (efforts targeted equally on-and off-road, efforts targeted entirely off-road and efforts targeted entirely onroad). 4. On average, on-road detectability was seven times higher for cats and three times higher for foxes. Targeting survey effort on-road yielded the greatest power for detecting declines in both species, but our ability to detect smaller declines decreased with decreasing initial occupancy probability. No level of decline was detectable for cats This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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Ecological monitoring is crucial for tracking changes in the status of species over time. However, ensuring that monitoring programs possess adequate statistical power—capacity to detect changes in populations with a high level of confidence—remains a challenge for many wildlife managers globally. While new monitoring technologies potentially offer cost effective solutions to this problem, transitioning to these methods requires careful calibration with existing techniques, such that differences in power and cost can be measured and assessed accurately. Here, we compare new (camera traps) and conventional (live trapping) survey methods in terms of cost and statistical power in tracking occupancy declines in an endangered marsupial predator, the northern quoll (Dasyurus hallucatus). We show that camera trap monitoring designs can detect northern quoll occupancy declines of 30%, 50%, and 80% at reduced cost when compared to live trap designs, without compromising statistical power. Overall, we find support for the cost‐effectiveness of camera traps for species monitoring and its potential to replace existing live trap sampling of species when measuring changes in occupancy. Additionally, we offer a robust framework to compare new monitoring techniques against pre‐existing methods on the basis of statistical power.

Fire has shaped global ecosystems for millennia by directly killing organisms and indirectly altering habitats and resources. All terrestrial ecosystems, including fire‐prone ecosystems, rely on soil‐inhabiting fungi, where they play vital roles in ecological processes. Yet our understanding of how fire regimes influence soil fungi remains limited and our knowledge of these interactions in semiarid landscapes is virtually absent. We collected soil samples and vegetation measurements from sites across a gradient in time‐since‐fire ages (0–75 years‐since‐fire) and fire frequency (burnt 0–5 times during the recent 29‐year period) in a semiarid heathland of south‐eastern Australia. We characterized fungal communities using ITS amplicon‐sequencing and assigned fungi taxonomically to trophic guilds. We used structural equation models to examine direct, indirect and total effects of time‐since‐fire and fire frequency on total fungal, ectomycorrhizal, saprotrophic and pathogenic richness. We used multivariate analyses to investigate how total fungal, ectomycorrhizal, saprotrophic and pathogenic species composition differed between post‐fire successional stages and fire frequency classes. Time‐since‐fire was an important driver of saprotrophic richness; directly, saprotrophic richness increased with time‐since‐fire, and indirectly, saprotrophic richness declined with time‐since‐fire (resulting in a positive total effect), mediated through the impact of fire on substrates. Frequently burnt sites had lower numbers of saprotrophic and pathogenic species. Post‐fire successional stages and fire frequency classes were characterized by distinct fungal communities, with large differences in ectomycorrhizal species composition. Understanding the complex responses of fungal communities to fire can be improved by exploring how the effects of fire flow through ecosystems. Diverse fire histories may be important for maintaining the functional diversity of fungi in semiarid regions.

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