Riparian land-cover data and model code for: Multiple-region, N-mixture community models to assess associations of riparian area, fragmentation, and species richness

The associations of habitat area and fragmentation with species richness long have been major topics within community ecology. Recent discussion has focused on properly assessing fragmentation independent of habitat area (fragmentation per se), and on whether fragmentation has significant negative or positive associations with species richness. We created a novel, multiple-region, N-mixture community model (MNCM) to examine the relations of riparian area and fragmentation with species richness of breeding birds in mountain ranges within the Great Basin, Nevada, USA. Our MNCM accounts for imperfect detection in count data at the survey-point level while allowing comparisons of species richness among regions in which those points are embedded. We used individual canyons within mountain ranges as regions in our model and measured riparian area and the normalized landscape shape index, a metric of fragmentation that is independent of total riparian area. We found that riparian area, but not...