EDI Staging Environment
Biodiversity in many areas is rapidly shifting and declining as a consequence of global change. As such, there is an urgent need for new tools and strategies to help identify, monitor, and conserve biodiversity hotspots. One way to identify these areas is by quantifying functional diversity, which measures the unique roles of species within a community and is valuable for conservation because of its relationship with ecosystem functioning. Unfortunately, the trait information required to evaluate functional diversity is often lacking and is difficult to harmonize across disparate data sources. Biodiversity hotspots are particularly lacking in this information. To address this knowledge gap, we compiled Frugivoria, a trait database containing dietary, life-history, and morphological traits as well as IUCN conservation status, for mammals and birds exhibiting frugivory, which are important for seed dispersal, an essential ecosystem service. Accompanying Frugivoria is an open workflow that harmonizes trait and taxonomic data from disparate sources and enables users to analyze traits in space. This version of Frugivoria contains mammal and bird species found in contiguous moist montane forests and adjacent moist lowland forests of Central and South America– the latter specifically focusing on the Andean states. In total, Frugivoria includes 35,073 unique trait values, including new values and harmonized values from existing databases. Frugivoria adds 11,246 new trait values (4,405 for mammals and 6,842 for birds) for a total of 1,732 bird and mammal species. These traits include observed and inferred range size, habitat specialization, body size, and sexual dimorphism. Frugivoria fills gaps in trait categories from other databases such as diet category, home range size, generation time, and longevity. In addition, Frugivoria adds newly described species not included in other databases and harmonizes species classifications among databases. 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.
EDI is a collaboration between the University of New Mexico and the University of Wisconsin – Madison, Center for Limnology:
