Datasets of breeding records of Neotropical birds

There are around 2 million bird egg sets (~ 5 million eggs) collected since 1800 and deposited in more than 300 museums/institutions worldwide (for details see Marini, M.Â., L. Hall, D. Russell, J. Bates, R. McGowan, L. F. Silveira, S. K. Robinson, S. Frahnert, A. Gamauf, S. Córdoba-Córdoba, P. R. Sweet, F. R. Steinheimer, D. A. Lijtmaer, P. Tubaro, H. F. Greeney, R. Corado & Heming, N.M. 2020. The five million bird eggs in the world’s museum collections are an invaluable and underused resource. The Auk, Ornithological Advances 137(4):1-7. https://doi.org/10.1093/auk/ukaa036)

However, this large and untapped resource is poorly known and in large part accessible only by visiting each museum. A long-term project ("Spatio-temporal variations in breeding traits of birds from the Neotropical region") started in 2014 has been recovering breeding information of Neotropical birds by visiting egg collections and taking digital photographs of egg sets and their labels/cards. So far, after 39 museums visited in Latin America, Europe and USA, the project has amassed a collection of ~ 55,000 egg sets of Neotropical birds.

This dataset has been used in several of my own studies and by graduate students of my lab (Laboratório de Ecologia e Conservação de Aves / Bird Ecology and Conservation Lab) at the Zoology Department, University of Brasília (UnB), Brasília, Brazil. You can reach many of these publications at RESEARCHGATE (Miguel Ângelo Marini (researchgate.net)), ORCID (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7300-7321), or CV LATTES (http://lattes.cnpq.br/7912919431438847).

Here, you will find parts of the 55,000-dataset associated to specific published papers. The full dataset is not available yet since my Lab is still analyzing most of it and since a large part of the dataset is still under taxonomic resolution.

The first dataset available is from the following article:
Sousa NOM, Heming NM, Marini MÂ (2024) Clutch size but not egg size associates with migration distance in South American land birds. Journal of Ornithology. DOI: 10.1007/s10336-024-02186-9