Climatic-niche metrics for 1,516 bird species in China

Species temperature indices (STIs) summarize the climatic conditions associated with species’ geographic ranges and are used to calculate community temperature indices. We present a climatic-niche dataset for all 1,516 species listed in the China Bird Report Checklist v12.0. Four STI variants—Chinese breeding-range, wintering-range, combined-range, and global breeding-range indices—were calculated by intersecting BirdLife International range polygons with WorldClim v2.1 climate layers aggregated to a 0.25° grid. The dataset also includes temperature-niche breadth, mean annual precipitation, precipitation breadth, temperature seasonality, residency annotations, and a documented crosswalk between IOC and BirdLife taxonomies. Comparisons with eBird-derived estimates yielded correlations of 0.806 for breeding-season indices (895 species) and 0.870 for wintering-season indices (776 species). Comparison with published estimates for 60 species from Thousand Island Lake yielded a correlation of 0.687. Species rankings were highly consistent across other four independent climate baseline periods (r ≥ 0.9998). The dataset can support reproducible analyses of climatic-niche position and breadth, community composition, and climate-associated biodiversity change in China.