Traits_data_Koutsidi_2023.xlsx

Sheet “data”: This dataset includes six traits related to resource exploitation: size, trophic level, diet and feeding type (regarding the use of food resources), spawning period and spawning habitat (regarding spawning habitat use). Within each trait, 2–5 trait categories/modalities have been created using information on the species biology and preferences coming from the bibliography for each of the 108 species collected. A species can have non-zero values for more than one modality per trait in the dataset (to include within-species heterogeneity and allow for trait plasticity within a population). Each species has been assigned values ranging from 0 to 1 in a fashion that, within each trait, the sum of all modalities proportions equals 1. A literature search was conducted to find studies relevant to diet and spawning traits for each species in the dataset. The publications (they are cited per species × trait combination in the published dataset) were examined individually, to extract the relevant information. We grouped the retrieved data based on the limits/range of our trait categories/modalities by calculating their frequency in the respective studies and the detail of the information given there. For example, we gathered bibliography on a species spawning period among seasons: spring, summer, autumn, winter or their combination. We calculated the frequency of each season allocating it to a proportion of the categories of traits (modalities) in each study. To calculate the final proportions we calculated the average modality proportions across studies. Similarly, regarding species diet, we gathered the studies with information on food items consumed by individuals, calculated modalities frequency within the studies and then across the studies allocating them as percentages in our trait categories (e.g piscivore or zoobenthivore etc). Some information for a number of species was also obtained from FishBase or SeaLifeBase, using their literature catalogs. Thus, if e.g., there were two studies in the bibliography regarding the diet of species A and one study writes that this species is 50% piscivore and 50% zoobenthivore and the other study reports that the species is entirely (100%) piscivore, the final modality percentages were derived by averaging the percentages across studies, i.e., piscivore: 75% = 0.75, zoobenthivore: 25% = 0.25. <br> Sheet “references”: This worksheet includes one or more numbers representing a reference from which the information to fill in the trait information as data was taken. <br> Sheet “references_list”: This worksheet is a list of the reference numbers of the previous worksheet and the corresponding full references.