Species richness and evenness of European bird communities show differentiated responses to measures of productivity

Understanding patterns of species diversity is crucial for ecological research and conservation, and this understanding may be improved by studying patterns in the two components of species diversity, species richness and evenness of abundance of species. Variation in species richness and evenness has previously been linked to variation in total abundance of communities as well as productivity gradients. Exploring both components of species diversity is essential because these components could be unrelated or driven by different mechanisms. The aim of this study was to investigate the relationship between species richness and evenness in European bird communities along an extensive latitudinal gradient. We examined their relationships with latitude and Net Primary Productivity, which determines energy and matter availability for heterotrophs, as well as their responses to territory densities (i.e., the number of territories per area) and community biomass (i.e., the bird biomass per are..., The following information is also given in the main manuscript. The individual contributors should be contacted for more information or permissions to work with their respective data sets.

276 of the plots come from the British Trust for Ornithology’s (BTO) Common Bird Census (CBC) and the BTO/Joint Nature Conservation Committee/Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, Breeding Bird Survey (BBS) (Marchant, 1990; Freeman et al., 2007).
Two additional plots from the UK were obtained from Williamson (1975) and Gaston and Blackburn (2008).
78 plots from Germany were provided by Bowler and Schwarz (pers. comm.), see Schwarz and Flade (1989) and Kamp et al. (2021).
2 plots from Estonia were provided by Leivits (pers. comm.).
7 plots from Poland were obtained from Tomiałojć and Wesołowski (1996) and Wesołowski et al. (2002). 
 6 plots from Sweden were obtained from Enemar et al. (2004), Svensson (2006 & 2009).
2 plots from Finland were obtained from Palmgren (1987) and Lehikoinen et al...., , # Species richness and evenness of European bird communities show differentiated responses to measures of productivity

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.2547d7x0r](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.2547d7x0r)

## Description of the data and file structure

See the main manuscript for details about the individual sources of the data set. The uploaded data set includes all additional data used in the analysis, such as Plot, Year, Species, Count, CommBio_Area, Area, Pairs_Area, NPP, GPP, Latitude, Habitat, and Country.

**Code/Software**

Attached is the R-code for the model that we developed in this manuscript. Packages needed to run the code are listed in the script. The data set was saved using the \"fwrite\" function from the \"data.table\" package and should be loaded using the \"fread\" function from the same package.