A multi-region community model for inference about geographic variation in species richness

Data used in the application of the multi-region community model (MRCM) to detection non-detection data collected from bird assemblages in R=8 geographically distinct areas (regions) in northern Italy. We augmented the data for all regions such that M = M_r = 200, i.e., by 200-n_r species for each region. The data file contains the following six objects: dataREG: region-specific covariates; K_tot: number of sampling occasions for each site in each region; M: total number of species in the augmented data set; nsites: total number of sites per region; nspecies: total number of observed species for each region; Yaug_tot: augmented species-by-sites-by-region detection frequency matrix.