Occurrence patterns of sympatric forest wallabies: assessing the influence of structural habitat attributes on the coexistence of and .

Background: We studied the occurrence of two sympatric wallabies, the red-necked pademelon () and the red-legged pademelon () in northeastern New South Wales, Australia in relation to structural habitat attributes. At our study site, both species inhabit closed forest environments and have overlapping distributions, but leaves the forest at night to graze adjacent grassy forest edges whereas remains within the forest and browses forest vegetation. The objectives of the study were to investigate how structural attributes of two forest types, wet sclerophyll forest and rainforest, relate to the fine-scale occurrence of these two wallaby species within the forested environment.

Methods: We gathered occurrence data from 48 camera trap stations divided equally between rainforest and wet sclerophyll forest. At each camera point, we also measured a range of structural habitat attributes to determine habitat affiliations for the two species. Principal component analyses were used to describe major trends in habitat, and generalised linear models were used to describe the efficacy of the variables in predicting habitat occurrence of each species.

Results: The number of occurrences of was significantly greater than occurrences of , which was driven by significantly greater occurrences of in wet sclerophyll forest. There was both spatial and temporal partitioning between the two species; there was a significant difference in the occurrences of the two species at individual cameras and had a different activity schedule than in wet sclerophyll forest, where the latter reached its greatest rate of occurrence. At a finer (camera station) scale, occurrences of increased with proximity to roads and grassy edges and at sites that were less rocky and less steep. occurrence increased in the presence of rainforest elements like vines, palms and ferns, more ground-level cover and tree-fall gaps and at sites with fewer emergent eucalypts.

Conclusion: Our findings have implications for managing these pademelons and their habitats. is a common species that was encountered more often than , and it responded positively to human disturbance like roadsides and grassy edges, presumably because these areas provided good grazing opportunities. By comparison, is a threatened species, and it responded to natural disturbance like tree-fall gaps where lateral cover was greater, and where rainforest food plants may be more abundant. Our results suggest, therefore, that conservation of the threatened requires the preservation of intact rainforest.