GRDC mouse surveillance and modelling

The purpose of these projects is to predict house mouse abundance across grain growing regions to provide early warning of potential mouse plagues. This data has been collected by CSIRO and subcontractors; CSIRO has collated and cleaned this data into this joint dataset. House mice are surveyed in crops using three different methods: live-traps, active burrow counts and chew cards. Live trapping currently only occurs at three properties (two paddocks are monitored simultaneously). Active burrow counts and chew cards (i.e., rapid assessment) surveys are also conducted in each paddock simultaneously over one night. In all other sites, only rapid assessment surveys are conducted. In some instances, active burrow counts are not conducted as visibility of the burrows is too low due to dense crops or because of prolific soil cracks. In these cases, chew cards are still deployed, sometimes with higher effort. Each data type is provided as a separate CSV file, which contains a series of common variables denoting sites and times, as well as dataset-specific columns describing effort and results.