Data for: The evolution of enclosed nesting in passerines is shaped by competition, energetic costs and predation threat

Many bird species breed in enclosed nests which may provide better protection against predation and climatic conditions compared to open nests and are generally associated with larger clutch sizes and slower offspring growth. Here we show that different enclosed nesting strategies are each linked to behaviors with very different costs and benefits on a macroevolutionary scale. Using a detailed dataset of nest structure and location from the order Passeriformes we employed phylogenetic comparative methods to evaluate (1) how predation, competition, design complexity and energetic costs have shaped evolutionary transitions between different nesting strategies and (2) whether these strategies also have distinct relationships with life-history traits. We find that flexible strategies (i.e., nesting in both open and enclosed sites) as well as energetically demanding strategies are evolutionarily unstable, indicating the presence of underlying ecological trade-offs between anti-predator prote..., The dataset was collected from literature sources., , # The evolution of enclosed nesting in passerines is shaped by competition, energetic costs and predation threat: Data

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.00000008c](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.00000008c)

This dataset (Supplementary\_Data\_S1.csv) contains information on nest location (n = 4,105) and structure (n = 3,949) for passerine species alongside with a set of life-history, biogeographical and environmental variables associated with each species.

## Description of the data and file structure

### Variable list

#### Taxonomy

* HBW_name: scientific species names used in Handbook of the Birds of the World or HBW (del Hoyo et al. (2019))
* Tree_name: scientific species names used in Jetz et al. (2012)
* HBW_species_common_name: species common names used in HBW
* HBW_family: scientific family names used in HBW
* HBW_family_common_name: family common names used in HBW

#### Life-history traits

* Body_mass..g: geometric mean of average mass in g for males and females, except for case...