Giayetto et al, 2023 - Ecological and life-history traits and their relationship with West Nile virus and Saint Louis Encephalitis virus exposure risk.

Code and data to accompany: Giayetto et al., 2023 - Ecological and life-history traits and their relationship with West Nile virus and Saint Louis Encephalitis virus exposure risk. We combined a dataset of ecological and life-history traits that were potentially relevant to explain West Nile virus (WNV) and Saint Louis Encephalitis virus (SLEV) birds’ exposure risk. We selected the following six traits: body mass, clutch size, nest height, nest type, diet type and migratory status, and we combined it with data obtained in the field on the serological status of 3502 birds against the aforementioned viruses. We used the serological state against WNV and SLEV (presence/absence of neutralizing antibodies) data from free-ranging birds, obtained between 2004 and 2019 in 5 different Argentinean provinces and compiled the traits of the 130 represented species in our dataset of de sampled free-ranging birds. Both, body mass and clutch size data were mainly complied from Cooke et al 2019, that includes these following databases: PanTHERIA (Jones et al., 2009), Pacifici database (Pacifici et al., 2013), EltonTraits database (Wilman et al., 2014) and Amniote database (Myhrvold et al., 2015). We supplemented missing species traits using data from Aráoz et al 2016. Information referring to nest characteristics, diet and migratory status was extracted mainly from The Cornell Lab of Ornithology website (https://birdsoftheworld.org). Nest height was classified in three categories, as ground, understory (nests predominantly found above ground and below 3m) or canopy/sub-canopy (nests predominantly found above 3m). Nest type was classified in three categories, as open cup, closed cup or cavity. Diet type was categorized into 7 groups according to the primary diet of each species: Folivore-Frugivore, Frugivore-Insectivore, Granivore, Granivore-Insectivore, Insectivore, Insectivore-Carnivore and Omnivore. Migratory status was categorized as resident or migrant. # FILESET nmds-traits.csv - Dataframe for NMDS analysis according birds seroprevalence and their ecological and life history traits. nmds.R - Scripts for the visualization of birds’ species according their seroprevalence and their ecological and life history traits via NMDS Graf_WNV_SLEV_CoefData.R - Codes for plotting model-averaged parameter estimates and their CIs. database.csv - Compiled trait data and serological state of Argentinean birds against WNV and SLEV. Imputed data of Argentinean birds tested for WNV and SLEV neutralizing antibodies and their compiled traits by specie (body mass, clutch size, migratory status, diet type, nest type, nest, height). WN-traits.R - Codes for WNV model averaging analysis SLE-traits.R - Codes for SLEV model averaging analysis