Literature review

To evaluate the prevailing approach to sugar glider baiting among practitioners and variance in trapping outcomes, we performed a meta-analytical review of the literature. We were particularly interested in the types of baits used and in details of trap type and position. A total of 140 publications were screened, and 35 involved baiting for sugar gliders. Sixteen of these publications (comprising a total of 26 unique studies) reported the count of individuals captured, total captures or trap nights. We conducted a meta-analysis on these data using the package ‘metafor’ v.3.8-1, (Viechtbauer, 2010) in R v.4.1.0 (R Core Team 2021) . We used log-transformed incidence rates as the outcome measure to compare rates of unique captures and trap success among studies. Heterogeneity across studies was tested with a multi-meta-regression using incidence rate effect size as the response outcome and numerous study moderators were investigated (bait type, habitat connectivity, trap type, trap height, trap nights, study year). Model averaging was used to ensure inference incorporated model structure uncertainty, and was performed using the package ‘Mumln’ v. 1.43.17 (Barton, 2020) (please see Supporting Information for full description of methods).