Causes for spatiotemporal variation in reproductive performance of Eurasian oystercatchers in a human-dominated landscape

These data comprise the data of four chapters from the PhD thesis from Frauendorf (2022) entitled 'Causes for spatiotemporal variation in reproductive performance of Eurasian oystercatchers in a human-dominated landscape’. The thesis focusses on quantifying the anthropogenic impacts on the reproductive performance of oystercatchers across the Netherlands. The dataset contains data from chapter 3, 5 and 6, which were used in the thesis but are not published open access yet.

For chapter 3 oystercatchers were caught during winter across the wintering ground of oystercatchers (Wadden sea and Delta estuary) and their condition was measured (physiological measurements through blood and biometric measurements). The data also include resighting data from ringed individuals that were used for mark-recapture survival analysis (state and age matrices). In addition, environmental variables were collected from open source data. Next, the birds were followed from their wintering ground to the breeding ground where we measured their reproductive success.

Chapter 5 includes data about the reproductive performance of oystercatchers (available from several different data sources across the Netherlands). Next, we collected data on the environment from different (open access) data sources about for instance habitat type, land use intensity, predation and food availability.

In chapter 6, we used data on bill shape as a proxy for feeding specialization based on data from winter catches (chapter 3 in PhD thesis) to illustrate the proportion of birds with different feeding specialization in the studied population.