Data and code for Zheng et al. Contrasting coloured ventral wings are a visual collision avoidance signal in birds

This repository contains codes and data for Zheng et al. Contrasting coloured ventral wings are a visual collision avoidance signal in birds. We have three folders, each containing one of the three datasets of contrast scores of avian ventral wings. These include the mean manual contrast ventral wing scores for 1780 species, a subset of 1745 diurnal species, 648 species with high-resolution museum ventral images, and the mean Root-Mean-Square (RMS) contrast ventral wing scores for the same 648 species. We tested the collision avoidance hypothesis for each dataset by assessing the relationships between the contrast scores and ecological traits. We used the Bayesian Generalized Linear Mixed Models in MCMCglmm with considering the phylogenetic relatedness among species and the uncertainties of 100 phylogenetic trees (downloaded in birdtree.org). We included body mass, flock size, coloniality (colonial vs. non-colonial breeding species), activity time (nocturnal vs. diurnal), the number of sympatric predators, and the interaction between coloniality and body mass as the predictors. In each folder, we included four files, including an R source file, a dataset containing the contrast scores and the ecological traits of the corresponding species, and a tree file containing 100 randomly sampled phylogenetic trees among these species. See the Methods of the paper for detail.