Study Area
We sampled four plots across two study sites, Mark Oliphant Conservation Park (hereafter called Mark Oliphant CP) and Kenneth Stirling Conservation Park (hereafter called Kenneth Stirling CP) in the Mount Lofty Ranges, Adelaide, South Australia, Australia, on Kaurna and Peramangk Country (Table 1; Figure 1). These sites were selected as they had the required land cover types in close proximity and both had similar pre-European vegetation communities. Each site had adjoining and large (i.e., >1 ha) grassy and native vegetation land cover types. The grassy areas were cleared of all non-grass vegetation (hereafter called ‘cleared’ plots), and the native woodland areas had remnant vegetation (hereafter called ‘native’ plots). We established spatially-paired 25 x 25 m (NSEW-oriented) plots in each land cover type at both sites. These paired plots were less than 500 m apart within each site, with native plots situated at least 100 m away from the adjacent cleared land to reduce edge effects (Zhao, Song, et al., 2021). We collected soil moisture and below (-10 cm) and aboveground temperatures (+0 cm, +10 cm) with TMS-4 data loggers (TOMST, Prague, Czech Republic), which were installed at each plot for the duration of the study period (6 weeks), recording at 15-minute intervals (Wild et al., 2019).