Fig. 2

Model predictions for rain and month effects. Lines indicate the predictions, shaded area the 95 % confidence interval (CI), ranges of independent variable shown only include values with actual observations. Rain (i.e. maximum precipitation in 24 h) had significant main effects on spadefoot toad numbers, however, the effect was strongest in June (a). To visualize the seasonal effects, we back-transformed the trigonometric functions to months and averaged the effects, as well as the CI. We observed a striking increase of toad activity in June with intense rainfalls (b). Main effects of month and temperature only had minor effects (< 1 individuals) on toad activity (see Additional file 1: Fig S1)