Does a lack of juveniles indicate a threat? Understanding body size distributions in a group of long-lived vertebrates

This data set contains size and/or sex data from 41,021 freshwater turtles from 38 species and 428 populations located in parts of Australia both with and without introduced foxes, as well as populations in the United States of America, which naturally have raccoons (Procyon lotor), foxes, and other nest predators. The goal was to examine population-level body size distributions to establish a baseline for “typical” turtle populations and test whether populations that are exposed to introduced foxes have proportionately fewer juveniles compared to both AU populations that lack introduced foxes and USA populations that are naturally exposed to nest predators. We additionally conducted analyses on the biases of trapping methods, effects of sample size, and effects of water body type. This data set was assembled by pooling the data from numerous researchers., , # Does a lack of juveniles indicate a threat? Understanding body size distributions in a group of long-lived vertebrates

Dataset DOI: [10.5061/dryad.47d7wm3s2](10.5061/dryad.47d7wm3s2)

## Description of the data and file structure

These data sets were collected by multiple researchers conducting field work on freshwater turtles. They have been combined for this study.

### Files and variables

#### File: full.data.csv

**Description:** This contains the primary data used for most analyses. Each individual turtle was only included upon first capture. Therefore, no recaptures were included. These data have not been subset to populations with at least 50 individuals. See original paper (\"**Does a lack of juveniles indicate a threat? Understanding body size distributions in a group of long-lived vertebrates**\" [Journal of Animal Ecology]) for additional information.

Throughout, NA indicates that the data point was not collected.

##### Variables

* country.fox: Codes for country and whe...,