Frugivoria: A trait database for birds and mammals exhibiting frugivory across contiguous Neotropical moist forests

Motivation: Biodiversity in many areas is rapidly declining because of global change. As such, there is an urgent need for new tools and strategies to help identify, monitor and conserve biodiversity hotspots. This is especially true for frugivores, species consuming fruit, because of their important role in seed dispersal and maintenance of forest structure and health. One way to identify these areas is by quantifying functional diversity, which measures the unique roles of species within a community and is valuable for conservation because of its relationship with ecosystem functioning. Unfortunately, the functional trait information required for these studies can be sparse for certain taxa and specific traits and difficult to harmonize across disparate data sources, especially in biodiversity hotspots. To help fill this need, we compiled Frugivoria, a trait database containing ecological, life-history, morphological and geographical traits for mammals and birds exhibiting frugivory. Frugivoria encompasses species in contiguous moist montane forests and adjacent moist lowland forests of Central and South America-the latter specifically focusing on the Andean states. Compared with existing trait databases, Frugivoria harmonizes existing trait databases, adds new traits, extends traits originally only available for mammals to birds also and fills gaps in trait categories from other databases. Furthermore, we create a cross-taxa subset of shared traits to aid in analysis of mammals and birds. In total, Frugivoria adds 8662 new trait values for mammals and 14,999 for birds and includes a total of 45,216 trait entries with only 11.37% being imputed. Frugivoria also contains an open workflow that harmonizes trait and taxonomic data from disparate sources and enables users to analyse traits in space. As such, this open-access database, which aligns with FAIR data principles, fills a major knowledge gap, enabling more comprehensive trait-based studies of species in this ecologically important region.Main Types of Variable Contained: Ecological, life-history, morphological and geographical traits.Spatial Location and Grain: Neotropical countries (Mexico, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Panama, El Salvador, Belize, Nicaragua, Ecuador, Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, Argentina, Venezuela and Chile) with contiguous montane regions.Time Period and Grain: IUCN spatial data: obtained February 2023, spanning range maps collated from 1998 to 2022. IUCN species data: obtained June 2019-September 2022. Newly included traits: span 1924 to 2023.Major Taxa and Level of Measurement: Classes Mammalia and Aves; 40,074 species-level traits; 5142 imputed traits for 1733 species (mammals: 582; birds: 1147) and 16 sub-species (mammals).

Automated summary

There is an urgent need for new tools and strategies to identify, monitor and conserve biodiversity hotspots, especially for frugivores. To address this need, we compiled Frugivoria, a trait database containing ecological, life-history, morphological and geographical traits for mammals and birds exhibiting frugivory. Frugivoria harmonizes existing trait databases, adds new traits, and fills gaps in trait categories. This open-access database fills a major knowledge gap and enables more comprehensive trait-based studies in the neotropical region.