Frugivoria is a trait database containing dietary, life-history, morphological traits as well as IUCN conservation status, for birds and mammals exhibiting frugivory, which are important for seed dispersal, an essential ecosystem service. This version of Frugivoria encompasses species in moist forests of Central and South America including countries with contiguous mountain ranges. Frugivoria and its workflow enables researchers to quantify relationships between traits and the environment, as well as spatial trends in functional diversity, contributing to basic knowledge and applied conservation of frugivores in this region. By harmonizing trait information from disparate sources and providing code to access species occurrence data, this open-access database fills a major knowledge gap and enables more comprehensive trait-based studies of species exhibiting frugivory in this ecologically important region.
NASA FINESST Grant #80NSSC19K1332
- Beth E. Gerstner: PhD Candidate, Michigan State University (MSU)
- Patrick Bills: Data Scientist, MSU
- Phoebe L. Zarnetske: PI, MSU Spatial & Community Ecology Lab (SpaCE Lab)
Frugivoria: A trait database for birds and mammals exhibiting frugivory across contiguous Neotropical moist forests (10.1111/geb.13716), Global Ecology and Biogeography (edi.1220.5)
This repository contains code and the accompanying workflow for producing the Frugivoria functional trait database and evaluating its data. The data workflow follows the recommendations from the Environmental Data Initiative and the database is hosted by EDI.
This code and workflow allows users to follow the construction of the Frugivoria montane database and also construct relevant outputs.
See ./code/readme.md for more details.
The Frugivoria trait dataset, R scripts, and supporting information are hosted on EDI and can be viewed here.