Among-species variation in six decades of changing migration timings explained through ecology, life-history and abundance

Species utilising seasonal environments must now alter timings of key life-history events in response to large-scale climatic changes, thereby maintaining trophic synchronies. Yet substantial among-species variation in cross-decadal phenological changes is observed. Transitioning from basic description of such variation towards prediction of future phenological responses now requires standardised studies that rigorously quantify and explain variation in the direction, magnitude and form of changing timings across diverse species in relation to key ecological and life-history variables. Accordingly, we fitted multi-quantile regressions to 59 years of high-quality multi-species data on spring and autumn bird migration timings through northern Scotland. We demonstrate substantial variation in cross-decadal changes in timings among 72 species, and quantify the degree to which variation can be explained through differences in species ecology, life-history and population trajectories. Consist..., The data comprise processed field observations of migrant bird timings through Fair Isle, Scotland, in both spring and autumn from 1960-2018.
The data are the 5th, 10th, 25th, 50th, 75th, 90th and 95th quantiles of the raw distributions of species sighting dates.
Covariate data on species ecology and life-history (extracted from other published data sources) are included to facilitate replication of analyses.
There are data from a total of 72 species in spring and/or autumn, comprising selected (relatively common) passerines and non-passerines.
 , , # Data from: Among-species variation in six decades of changing migration timings explained through ecology, life-history and abundance

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.31zcrjdth](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.31zcrjdth)

The main dataset comprises two data files, giving the quantile migration dates for each focal species in 1) spring and 2) autumn in each study year (1960-2018).

There are data for 64 species in each season (which can differ between the seasons).

The datasets also give:

the values of key ecological and life-history covariates for each species

the total abundance of each species in each year and the mean across years through the study period

the slope of abundance on year

These data are sufficient to reproduce the analyses presented in Dale et al.'s manuscript, when combined with phylogeny data which can be downloaded from birdtree.org

In addition, for ease of analysis, we include a separate file of all covariates for all 72 species considered across spring and aut...