Code and data for: Human pressures threaten diet specialized mammal communities

Environmental change is increasing worldwide, and many animal species face anthropogenic threats, especially diet specialists. Yet the degree to which specialist species are currently impacted by environmental change remains poorly understood. Here, we examine how anthropogenic pressures impact dietary specialist species. To achieve this, we calculated an index of diet specialization for the majority of mammal species, based on the Gini inequality coefficient focused on all different dietary items and combined these indices with human footprint data. We used spatially explicit tests to compare the global pattern of mammal diet specialization based on Mantel statistics and a generalized linear mixed model to assess the variations in the percentage of diet specialist species in mammal communities regarding the total species richness, mean values of the human footprint, and the interaction between protected or non-protected areas and the continent. These analyses revealed global patterns in human pressure and its potential impacts on dietary specialist mammal species. We found that areas with many diet specialists in mammal communities are also impacted by high human pressure. Additionally, we found that the global protected area system adequately covers habitat for many mammal diet specialists, but has lower effectiveness in South America, Oceania, North America and Europe compared with Africa and Asia. Finally, we identified potential reservoirs for specialist species – places that contain many highly diet-specialist species and are subject to less human pressure – which may be important for conservation efforts. Our findings highlight limitations with existing conservation efforts and underscore the importance of conserving specialist species.