Using joint species distribution modelling to identify climatic and non-climatic drivers of Afrotropical ungulate distributions

The relative importance of the different processes that determine the distribution of species and the assembly of communities is a key question in ecology. The distribution of any individual species is affected by a wide range of environmental variables as well as through interactions with other species; the resulting distributions determine the pool of species available to form local communities at fine spatial scales. A challenge in community ecology is that these interactions (e.g., competition, facilitation, etc.) often are not directly measurable. Here, we used Hierarchical Modelling of Species Communities (HMSC), a recently developed framework for joint species distribution modelling, to estimate the role of biotic effects alongside environmental factors using latent variables. We investigate the role of these factors determining species distributions in communities of Artiodactyla, Perissodactyla and Proboscidea in the Afrotropics, an area of peak species richness for hoofed mamm..., Data were collected as described in the manuscript.  , , # Data from: **Climatic Variables Alone do not Determine Ungulate Distributions in the Afrotropics**

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This repository contains all data used for the paper \"Climatic Variables Alone do not Determine Ungulate Distributions in the Afrotropics\".

## Description of the Data and file structure

**Presab_plus_climate_variables_PROTECTEDAREASONLY_Res10arcminutes.csv, \_OpenHabitats.csv, \_TropicalForests.csv**

These three files contain presence/absence data for all ungulate species included in the analysis for all points in the **Afrotropics at 10 arcminute resolution**, with data derived from IUCN species range maps processed using the letsR package. Additionally, they contain environmental data for all points in the matrix for all 19 bioclimatic variables (from WorldClim) and land cover data (from the FAO Land and Water Division.)

**Trait_Data_AllUngulates.csv**

This file contains all trait data used in the calculation of Gower's Distance.

## Sharing/Access Information

Other data (i...