AVONICHE: A global dataset of dietary and foraging niches for birds

The role of each animal species in an ecosystem is largely determined both by the resources it uses and the behaviours through which these resources are obtained. Even in well-studied vertebrate groups, like birds, quantitative data on the relative use of different food resources in the context of foraging strategies is generally lacking. Most analyses in macroecology, macroevolution, and conservation biology are therefore limited to simplified dietary categories, ignoring the specific foraging behaviours and substrates used to access resources. Here we present AVONICHE, a dataset quantifying proportional membership in 32 foraging niches, representing a combination of dietary categories and associated foraging strategies used by all bird species. The dataset includes species-level information on the proportional use of the 32 foraging niches, each of which is defined as a particular foraging strategy within a specific dietary category (e.g., invertebrate feeding is subdivided into ..., , # AVONICHE: A global dataset of dietary and foraging niches for birds

Dataset DOI: [10.5061/dryad.1zcrjdg56](10.5061/dryad.1zcrjdg56)

## Description of the data and file structure

The dataset includes species-level information on the proportional use across 32 foraging niches, each of which is defined as a particular foraging strategy within a specific dietary category. The data includes information for all extant bird species (Class Aves). To allow integration with a global phylogeny and other data resources, we align species-level niche data with four different taxonomic treatments: BirdTree (9,993 species), Clements/eBird (10,661 species), BirdLife International (10,999 species), and the new AviList taxonomy (10,981 species).

### Files and variables

#### File structure

The AVONICHE dataset is composed of 4 main datasets:

1. **Avoniche1_Birdlife2020.csv**: Dataset with quantitative information on dietary and foraging niches for 10,999 species following the BirdLife Internationa...,