Methods for assessing small-scale variation in the abundance of a generalist mesopredator - Fig 1

Schematic representation of the experimental design used to compare different methods to estimate variation in red fox abundance in the Black Forest mountain range (I; session A–March-May 2017 & B–March-May 2018) and in the agricultural lowlands of the Upper Rhine Valley (II; session C–November 2017 and February 2018) in south-western Germany. In each session, we compared RAIs obtained from grid-based remote camera traps (rectangular box labelled ‘CT’) with triangular random faecal transect counts (session A and C, orange), scat-plot based faecal counts standardized by search duration (session B, blue) and faecal transects of fixed length along linear landscape features (session C, blue). Grey lines represent forest tracks in session A & B and linear landscape features in session C (e.g. hedges).