Data from: Abiotic and biotic predictors of macroecological patterns in bird and butterfly coloration|生态学数据集|动物颜色数据集

Animal colour phenotypes are invariably influenced by both their biotic community and the abiotic environments. A host of hypotheses have been proposed for how variables such as solar radiation, habitat shadiness, primary productivity, temperature, rainfall and community diversity might affect animal colour traits. However, while individual factors have been linked to colouration in specific contexts, little is known about which factors are most important across broad taxonomic and geographic scales. Using data collected from 570 species of birds and 424 species of butterflies from Australia which inhabit an area spanning a latitudinal range of 35 degrees and covering deserts, tropical and temperate forests, savannas and heathlands, we test multiple hypotheses from the colouration literature and assess their relative importance. We show that bird and butterfly species exhibit more reflective and less saturated colours in better-lit environments, a pattern that is robust across an array of variables expected to influence the intensity or quality of ambient light in an environment. Both taxa display more diverse colours in regions with greater net primary production and longer growing seasons. Models that included variables related to energy inputs and resources in ecosystems have better explanatory power for bird and butterfly colouration overall than do models that included community diversity metrics. However, the diversity of the bird community in an environment was the single most powerful predictor of colour pattern variation in both birds and butterflies. We observed strong similarities across taxa in the covariance between colour and environmental factors, suggesting the presence of fundamental macro-ecological drivers of visual appearance across disparate taxa.