Dominant deer mice show the importance of abundance in competition

Detecting competitive interactions is important for predicting species responses to environmental change, but it remains challenging, especially over large scales. Based on classical coexistence theory, competition should be most important between species with similar ecological traits (i.e., diet, habitat). However, species with life-history traits that allow them to be very prolific can have competitive effects even with subtle ecological overlap. Such species may be able to achieve such high abundances that they dominate all other competitors (i.e., “dominant entities”). We tested for competition and the importance of dominant entities in small mammal communities (n = 68 species) at 44 sites in 18 regions across the United States using the US National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON). We based inference on changes in abundance over time while also accounting for weather and habitat factors using a dynamic generalized joint attribute modeling framework. We compared relative inter..., , # Dryad dataset

Dataset DOI: [10.5061/dryad.dbrv15fdg](10.5061/dryad.dbrv15fdg)

## Description of the data and file structure

Ecological traits included in our analysis from the COMBINE mammal trait database (Soria et al. 2021) and were: fossoriality, arboreality, diet (i.e., the proportion of the diet made up of invertebrates, vertebrates, fruit, nectar, seeds and plants, respectively [note: per = percentage]), diet breadth (i.e., the number of different diet categories that constitute ≥ 20 % of a species’ diet; Soria et al. 2021), habitat breadth (i.e., the number of distinct level 1 IUCN habitats suitable for the species; Soria et al. 2021), trophic level and activity cycle (Soria et al. 2021). For life history traits, we used the mean adult mass (g), mean litter size, and number of litters per year for each species, the age at first reproduction, and maximum longevity from the COMBINE mammal trait database (Soria et al. 2021). We used mean survival estimates from (Cayuela et al. ...,