Nocturnal Activity Patterns of Wolf Spiders and Dunnarts in the Simpson Desert, 2016

The Simpson Desert in south-western Queensland, Australia, is the location for this study of diel activity overlap between the lesser hairy-footed dunnart and wolf spiders. Data was gathered via spotlight surveys in October 2016 and remote camera traps deployed from July to October 2016, totaling 2352 hours of deployment. The dataset provides mean activity times and is intended as an example for using the Overlap package in R.

Use Cases

• Modeling temporal niche overlap between predator and prey species based on diel activity data.
• Analyzing patterns in nocturnal wildlife activity using camera trap and spotlight survey data.
• Testing and demonstrating the functionality of the Overlap package in R for ecological studies.
• Investigating the relationship between encounter rates and disproportionate predation in arid ecosystems.

Strengths

• Data collection spanned 98 days (2352 hours) of camera trap deployment, providing continuous temporal coverage.
• Activity patterns were quantified using two complementary methods: hourly spotlight surveys and remote camera traps.
• Analysis includes mean activity times with confidence intervals for each species, derived using a specific R package (Overlap v 0.2.7).

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Data is from a specific, short-term study in 2016; temporal and geographic scope is limited.

Provenance

Source

Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network's Data Discovery

Collection Method

Spotlight surveys and remote camera trap imagery, with images tagged for location, species, date, and time.

Time Range

Primary data collection occurred in July-October 2016.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-06-13 10:57:10.596590; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Simpson Desert, south-western Queensland, Australia.