A database of Neotropical dung beetle local richness from standardized inventories

This database is based on a survey of published literature on dung beetle communities to extract information on species richness, abundance, type of bait, type of habitat, and sampling effort (as hours/pitfall) for different localities, discarding sites with low sampling effort. We used environmental variables to account for six possible explanations of species richness gradients: productivity, water–energy, ambient energy, habitat heterogeneity, resource heterogeneity, and seasonality, as well as spatial data to account for other geographically-structured phenomena. In total the database contains data for 300 localities.