Freshwater fish trophic ecology in Brazil's semiarid ecosystems: Evidence structure, response patterns, and evidence gaps

This repository contains the data, supplementary materials, and analytical resources supporting the systematic review “Freshwater fish trophic ecology in Brazil’s semiarid ecosystems: Evidence structure, response patterns, and evidence gaps.” The review evaluated the distribution, methodological characteristics, reporting completeness, comparability, directional responses, and evidence gaps of research on freshwater fish trophic ecology in the Caatinga. Searches were conducted in Scopus, Web of Science Core Collection, and SciELO for records indexed up to 28 May 2026. The final evidence base comprised 24 publications, including 23 primary studies and one narrative review. The repository includes: complete database-specific search strategies; bibliographic records and study-selection decisions; the audited study-level coding matrix; geographic, ecological, hydrological, trophic, and methodological data; reporting-completeness and evidence-comparability assessments; directional-response classifications; sensitivity and leave-one-out analysis outputs; normalized author-keyword frequencies and co-occurrence data; evidence-gap matrices; R scripts used to generate the descriptive analyses and figures; supplementary tables supporting the manuscript. The materials are provided to improve transparency, auditability, and reproducibility. The full texts of the reviewed publications are not included because they remain subject to their respective copyright and access conditions. Data extraction, organization, and consistency checking were assisted by OpenAI Codex and validated by the authors. All eligibility decisions, classifications, interpretations, and scientific conclusions remain the responsibility of the authors.