Estimated energy compensation was lower in nine Portal rodent plots in 2021–2025 than in 1997–2010

We tested whether small rodents at Portal, Arizona, regained their earlier capacity to replace energy use after kangaroo rat exclusion. We used 23,600 captures from nine plots with fixed rodent treatments, including 43 complete censuses in 2021–2025. With the assumed body-mass energy proxy, compensation was 29.2% in 2021–2025 and 49.3% in July 1997–January 2010. The difference was −20.1 percentage points. A paired year bootstrap gave a 95% interval of −35.5 to −4.0 points for the fixed plots. Sampling both plots and years gave −48.1 to +9.6 points, so inference about other plots is uncertain. The recent estimate did not differ clearly from the 21.6% estimate for February 2010–January 2020. Fixed species mass, counts, calendar-month weights, quality-control filters, and each plot omission retained a lower recent point estimate. We found and corrected 55 exact extra source copies in the selected 2025 captures. Keeping these copies changed recent compensation by less than 0.1 percentage point. The package contains unchanged source files, the copy audit, corrected tables, figures, code, provenance, and reproduction instructions. This is a later-data extension of a published experiment. The evidence concerns capture-based energy estimates at one site; it does not identify a cause or a regional trend.

biodiversity · species removal · ecological compensation · desert rodents · Portal Project · energy use · long-term experiment · reproducible analysis