Beneath the blue, yellow and green hues of the scrub and grasses in the South Australian desert, small and usually elusive native mammals dart across the sand at nightfall.
The delicate tracks left by native rodents tell a story about their lives - where they've been, what they've been eating and whether they've been chasing each other or fighting.
The Arid Recovery conservation zone is a window into the time before European colonisation, when introduced predators like foxes, rabbits, cats and domestic stock did not threaten native creatures.
The 12,300 hectare reserve is surrounded by a high wire fence to keep feral animals out, with a curved and floppy top designed to fling pouncing cats to the ground.
It is a sanctuary for both the threatened native animals and the people studying them.
"It's a really enjoyable experience being surrounded by nature that's not under threat," Arid Recovery's chief scientist Katherine Moseby told AAP.
"If I'm outside the reserve, I'm walking around seeing rabbits run past, seeing feral cat tracks on the dune, I'm seeing chewed branches from cattle and sheep.
"So to have that snapshot of what things should look like is a real privilege."
Inside the reserve, Professor Moseby and hundreds of volunteers have worked for 26 years to meticulously observe what happens to desert mammals when invasive predators are kept at bay.
The results, recently published in an international biology journal, have astounded scientists.
With thousands of traps set over that time to record data from about 10 species, researchers found population booms were up to 33 times higher after heavy rainfall years inside the reserve compared to outside.
"Up until now, we've thought introduced predators have a bit of an impact on native small mammals, maybe two or three times the impact of native predators," said Prof Moseby, who is also a researcher at the University of NSW.
"But having 10, 20, 30 times the impact on these small mammals is quite eye-opening."
The first species to respond to protection from feral predators was the introduced house mouse, with capture rates increasing from the first year of the study.
Hopping mice and plains mice, both native, were not captured until some years after the reserve was established but their numbers increased rapidly and remained high throughout the study.
Those species were not previously known within 50km of the site, likely due to their susceptibility to the cat and fox population.
A surprising and significant observation of the hopping and plains mice was their movement to new habitats.
Usually found living on sand dunes, high numbers of hopping mice were captured in swales - the scrubby depressions between the dunes - years after their population established.
Plains mice, known to live on cracking clay swales, were regularly trapped on dunes.
"When we're conserving habitat for these threatened species, we tend to look at where they are now and we don't think about the potential they have to expand out if we could just address those threats," Prof Moseby said.
"It's got implications for conservation planning and thinking more broadly about the habitats we can serve to to protect these threatened species."
Prof Moseby hopes the findings highlight just how much of Australia's fauna has been lost since colonisation.
"A lot of arid zone areas, people don't visit, or ... they just drive through and don't really understand or get to immerse themselves in that environment," she said.
"If you don't understand something, you're not going to care about it or want to protect it.Â
"Being able to expose so many different people to that environment and show people what it used to be like, it opens people's eyes and they realise just how much things have changed."
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