CarniDIET 1.0: A database of terrestrial, carnivorous mammal diets

Motivation: A species’ diet is central to understanding many aspects of
its biology, including its behaviour, movement, and ecological niche. The
diets of terrestrial carnivorous mammals, defined here as species
primarily consuming other mammals (hereafter, mammal-consumers), have been
extensively studied and can vary in the proportion of different food
types, and species, consumed across their geographic ranges. Accessibility
to data capturing such variation in diets of mammal-consumers across the
variety of ecosystems they occur in would provide valuable information for
conservation, and open research avenues for macroevolution and
macroecology. However, data on mammal-consumer diets across their
geographic ranges have not been systematically collated. Here, we present
CarniDIET (Version 1.0), an open-access database containing quantitative
data on the diets of terrestrial mammal-consumers collated from the
literature. Main types of variable contained: Diet records capturing the
percentage of mammalian prey, to the highest taxonomic resolution
available, and non-mammalian food types (e.g. birds, invertebrates) in the
diets of mammal-consumers at specific sites and times. Associated data
with each diet record includes, where available, age and sex of
mammal-consumer, sample size, sample origin, and quantification method as
well as spatial and temporal variables including dates, season, study
site, altitude and coordinates. Spatial location and grain: Global,
terrestrial. The spatial grain varies among sites from 0.03km2 to
100000km2, with a median of 170km2. Study centroids are provided as
latitude-longitude coordinates. Time period and grain: Original diet
samples were collected between 1933 and 2017, with half of studies
collected between 1994 and 2008. Studies summarise diets from one month to
66 years, with a median of one year. Major taxa and level of measurement:
Terrestrial carnivorous mammals that primarily consume other mammals (103
species). Studies generally represent species’ population averages,
although can include demographic breakdowns.