Community composition coupled with habitat fragmentation drives acoustic divergence in bird assemblages

Rapid expansion of human activities has altered abiotic and biotic environments and reshaped the sensory systems of animal species. Auditory perception, a key sensory component of soniferous species, is essential for signal detection, species recognition, and group coordination. Birds mitigate acoustic masking in fragmented habitats by actively modulating the spectral and temporal features of their songs. However, it remains challenging to determine whether these modulations are primarily driven by biotic factors (e.g., species interactions within varying community compositions) or by abiotic factors (e.g., island attributes). We surveyed bird communities on forested islands in the Thousand Island Lake region, China, using passive acoustic monitoring. We applied sound frequency-based analyses to examine the relationship between island attributes (area and isolation), acoustic assemblage composition (species richness, morphological and phylogenetic relatedness), and sound frequency ..., , # Data from: Community composition coupled with habitat fragmentation drives acoustic divergence in bird assemblages ### Description of the data and file structure This dataset includes sound frequency-based acoustic sensory traits of 41 bird species across 12 islands in the Thousand Island Lake, China, encompassing species richness, body size, phylogenetic distance, frequency overlap, and variations in peak frequency and frequency range. ### Files and variables #### File: SoundFrequencyData_in_TIL.csv ##### Variables * Island: Unique island identifier (Unit: none) * Assemblages(1-min time window): 1-minute time window for community-level analysis (Unit: min) * species: Bird species (Unit: none) * SR: Number of species within an assemblage (Unit: count) * CWMBS: Community-Weighted Mean Body Size (Unit: mm) * MPD: Mean Pairwise Phylogenetic Distance (Unit: branch length) * Freq.Overlap: Degree of frequency overlap in bird vocalizations within an acoustic assemblage (Unit: Hz) * Pea..., ,