An updated global dataset for diet preferences in terrestrial mammals: testing the validity of extrapolation

1. Diet is a key trait of an organism’s life history that influences a broad spectrum of ecological and evolutionary processes. Kissling et al. (2014) compiled a species-specific dataset of diet preferences of mammals for 38% of a total of 5364 terrestrial mammalian species assessed for the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List, to facilitate future studies. The authors imputed dietary data for the remaining 62% by using extrapolation from phylogenetic relatives. 2. We collected dietary information for 1261 mammalian species for which data were extrapolated by Kissling et al. (2014), in order to evaluate the success with which such extrapolation can predict true diets. 3. The extrapolation method devised by Kissling et al. (2014) performed well for broad dietary categories (consumers of plants and animals). However, the method performed inconsistently, and sometimes poorly, for finer dietary categories, varying in accuracy in both dietary categories and mammalian ord...