The AvianMetaNetwork: biotic interactions among birds of the continental United States and Canada

Interspecific interactions play a key role in shaping the realized niches and spatiotemporal distributions of organisms. Birds (class Aves) exhibit a wide variety of interspecific interactions, spanning facilitation (e.g., mixed flocking), parasitism (e.g., brood parasitism, kleptoparasitism), predation, competition (e.g., over food, space), mobbing, and and among others. However, documented observations of these interactions are disaggregated and fragmented across natural history texts and peer-reviewed literature, with few systematic databases of empirically-based interspecific interactions. Here, we present the AvianMetaNetwork, a comprehensive metanetwork dataset of 23 interspecific interactions among all documented bird species occurring in Canada and the continental United States (including Alaska). In addition to the 731 focal taxa for this region, we also include their interactions with an additional 1,258 taxa that interact with focal species outside the study region (e.g., in portions of focal taxa ranges outside the study area, for example during migration or non-breeding seasons). This interaction database contains entirely empirically-based data that were manually recorded through systematic review of text within the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Birds of the World. The analysis-ready Level 1 interaction data are accompanied by a taxonomic cross-walk table, and a reproducible Level 0 (raw) to Level 1 (cleaned) data workflow in R. By combining these interactions in a single, systematic database, the AvianMetaNetwork helps fill the Eltonian Shortfall knowledge gap in biotic interaction data. These comprehensive data now enable numerous ecological investigations involving birds at local to continental scales within North America, advancing both fundamental and applied areas of research.