Parasite abundance-occupancy relationships across biogeographic regions: Joint effects of niche breadth, host availability, and climate

Aim
Changing biodiversity and environmental conditions may allow multi-host pathogens to spread amongst host species and affect prevalence. There are several widely acknowledged theories about mechanisms that may influence variation in pathogen prevalence, including the controversially debated dilution effect and abundance-occupancy relationship hypotheses. Here, we explore such abundance-occupancy relationships for unique lineages of three vector-borne avian blood parasite genera (the avian malaria parasite Plasmodium and the related haemosporidian parasites Parahaemoproteus and Leucocytozoon) across biogeographical regions.
Location
Nearctic-Neotropical and Palearctic-Afrotropical regions
Methods
We compiled a cross-continental dataset of 17,116 bird individuals surveyed from 46 bird assemblages across the Nearctic-Neotropical and Palearctic-Afrotropical regions and explored relationships between local parasite lineage prevalence and host assemblage metrics in a Bayesian random regres..., To examine the prevalence-host specificity relationships of unique haemosporidian lineages in bird assemblages, we systematically compiled field and molecular screening data from studies that reported individual-level haemosporidian infection status and parasite cytochrome-b (cyt-b) sequences in bird assemblages with reasonably large sample sizes (≥ 30 individuals and more than five host species surveyed at a single location) based on a dataset updated from our previous study (Fecchio et al., 2021). The assembled data set included 36,896 individual birds with recorded presence-absence of infection with the haemosporidian genera Plasmodium, Parahaemoproteus, and Leucocytozoon, and all infections confirmed by molecular sequencing of a 477 bp nucleotide cyt-b fragment (Bensch, Perez-Tris, Waldenström, & Hellgren, 2004). Sequence identities were verified with a local BLAST against the MalAvi database (Bensch, Hellgren, & Perez-Tris, 2009). We then matched nucleotide sequences to res..., , # Parasite abundance-occupancy relationships across biogeographic regions: joint effects of niche breadth, host availability, and climate

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.gmsbcc2xg](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.gmsbcc2xg)

## Description of the data and file structure

| Variable | Description |
| :-------------------- | :------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ |
| Site.ID | ID fof the Site where birds have been captured |
| Lineage ...