Diverse strategies for tracking seasonal environmental niches at hemispheric scale

Species depend upon a constrained set of environmental conditions, or niches, for survival and reproduction that are increasingly lost under climatic change. Seasonal environments require species to either track their niches via movement or undergo physiological or behavioral changes to survive. Here we identify the tracking of both environmental niche position and breadth across 619 New World bird species and assess their phylogenetic and functional underpinning. Partitioning niche position and breadth tracking can inform whether climatic means or extremes constrain seasonal niches. We uncover diverse strategies, including the tracking of niche position, breadth, both, or neither, suggesting highly variable sensitivity to ongoing climatic change. There was limited phylogenetic determinism to this variation, but a strong association with functional attributes that differed between niche position and breadth tracking. Our findings imply significant functional consequences for communities..., Curated from GBIF, processed to relevant sampling points and generated species-level seasonal niche dissimilarity estimates, , # Data from: Diverse strategies for tracking seasonal environmental niches at hemispheric scale

Dataset DOI: [10.5061/dryad.2rbnzs7rs](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.2rbnzs7rs)

## Description of the data and file structure

### Files and variables

#### File: appendix_2.xlsx

**Description:** Updates to avian phylogeny. We updated the avian phylogeny of Jetz et al (2012) to the 2021 Clements taxonomy by harmonizing species names, as follows.

##### Variables

* Old names: names from Jetz et al (2012)
* New names: adjusted names to match 2021 Clements

#### File: appendix_1.xlsx

**Description:** Seasonal niche dissimilarity for 619 species of North American birds (sorted taxonomically). Dissimilarity is partitioned into Mahalanobis distance and determinant ratio for both seasonal (breeding/overwintering comparison) and locational (overwintering/winter at breeding sites comparison) dissimilarity. Position and breadth similarity (visualized and used in analyses) was generated from these ...,