Soundscapes and airborne laser scanning identify vegetation density and its interaction with elevation as main driver of bird diversity and community composition

Aim: Mountain ecosystems are hotspots of biodiversity due to their high variation in climate and habitats. Yet, above average rates of climate change and enhanced forest disturbance regimes alter local climatic conditions and vegetation structure, which should impact biodiversity. Here, we investigated the impact of vegetation and climate as well as their interactions on bird communities to improve our ability to predict climate-change effects on bird communities.
Location: European Alps, Germany
Methods: We studied patterns and drivers of bird communities at 213 plots along gradients in vegetation density and elevation using autonomous sound recorders. Bird species were identified from soundscapes by Convolutional Neural Networks (BirdNET) and taxonomists.
Results: Bird diversity and community metrics were moderately to strongly correlated for data based on either identification by BirdNET or taxonomists, and ecological findings were overall similar for both datasets. Vegetation densit..., Bird sampling
We used bioacoustic audio recorders (BAR, Frontier Labs, Salisbury, Australia; standard settings) to capture soundscapes in 2021. Recorders had to be moved between plots and could not be installed permanently due to the limited availability of recorders. On each plot, recording took place on four to five days distributed evenly between late winter (mid March) and late summer (mid August) in the submontane, montane, and subalpine zone. In the subalpine and alpine zone, only three to four recordings were conducted between late April and mid August due to snow cover restricting access in spring. Recording was limited to days with no or negligible rain and low wind speed. Recorders were placed at approximately 1.8 m height close to the plot centre, either attached to a tree or wooden pole. Recorders were programmed to record for two minutes every twelve minutes from two hours before to four hours after sunrise and from three hours before sunset to three hours after sunset.
Bir..., , # Soundscapes and airborne laser scanning identify vegetation density and its interaction with elevation as main driver of bird diversity and community composition

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.0000000br ](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.0000000br)

The dataset contains the audio files that were used for identification by taxonomists and the processed bird and environmental data at the level of sampling plots (number of rows = 213). Bird community metrics are based on the final list of species after excluding water-associated and wintering species as well as species detections by BirdNET with confidence levels smaller than the species-specific thresholds.

## Description of the data and file structure

The zip file of the audios contains a folder for each plot, each of which contains a folder for each sampling where the files are stored.

The csv file of the processed bird and environmental data contains:

* plot: unique identifier for each sampling plot

Environmental data:

* pzabove2...