Data used in: Assessing the resilience and viability of communities in a changing environment

In order to assess community resilience, we propose to analyse how variation in overall abundance of individuals affect the number of species. We define community senstivity as the ratio between rate of change in log expected number of individuals in the community and the rate of change in the log expected number of species. Second, we define community resistance as the proportional reduction in expected number of individuals that the community can sustain before expecting to lose one species. To illustrate these concepts we use four datasets of bird communities in European deciduous forests.

We estimated the total variance of the species abundance distribution in order to calculate the community sensitivity and resistance. We found large differences in species heterogeneity and species-specific response to environmental fluctuations, the two major components of the total variance.

The datasets are collected from various previously published sources, see references below and in the paper. The code for importing and analysing the raw data as done in the paper can be found here: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8252471, but we also provide better-structured datasets for easier applications to others.

Methods
The data consists of population estimates based on nest search or mapping of territorial individuals within a specific area.

For the locations we have:

Location
Position
Meters above sea level
Study area (size)
Time span

Ammarnäs
65°58'-65°59'N, 15°58'-16°8E
540 - 720 m.a.s.l.
0.420 km2

1964-1999

Budal
62°45'N, 10°30'E
800 m.a.s.l.
0.3 km2

1967-2018

Birdsong Valley
55°43'N, 13°18'E

0.13 km2

1953-1992

Eastern Wood
51°30'N, -0°38'E

0.16 km2

1950-1979