Wildfire on northern Indian Island
Immediately following our monitoring and experiments in August 2017, a
wildlife broke out on northern Indian Island in the vicinity of the four
quoll-invaded sites and burnt through all of the sites. Because of this,
our experimental design is confounded by the fact that all of our
quoll-invaded sites were burnt, and all of our quoll-free sites were
unburnt. Fire is a regular disturbance in this landscape (Andersenet al. 2005), and previous work has shown little effect of fire
on abundance, survival or recruitment of grassland melomys (Griffiths &
Brook 2015; Liedloff et al. 2018). Nonetheless, this confound
exists and we proceed with caution when interpreting the effects of
quolls on population size and survival of melomys.