DOI: 10.5061/dryad.sf7m0cg2k
title: Behavioural plasticity is associated with reduced extinction risk in birds

description: Behavioural plasticity is believed to reduce species vulnerability to
 extinction, yet global evidence supporting this hypothesis is lacking. We
 address this gap by quantifying the extent to which birds are observed
 behaving in novel ways to obtain food in the wild: based on a unique
 dataset of &gt;3,800 novel behaviours, we show that species with a
 higher propensity to innovate are at a lower risk of global extinction and
 are more likely to have increasing or stable populations than less
 innovative birds. These results mainly reflect a higher tolerance of
 innovative species to habitat destruction, the main threat for birds.
description: This dataset gathers information on foraging innovations,
 extinction risk, population trend, threats, biogeographic range, diet and
 habitat breadth, body mass, migratory behaviour, generation length,
 insularity and presence in urban areas for 8645 bird species.
 "<strong>species</strong>" is the species name using
 the IUCN taxonomy, "<strong>animal</strong>" is the
 species name considering the taxonomy from Jetz et al. (2012).
 <strong>Innovation data:</strong>
 The innovation data was compiled by systematically searching for
 reports of new behaviours in the short notes of 204 ornithology journals
 published between 1960 and 2018. A feeding behaviour was considered an
 innovation, and hence was included in the database, if it was described in
 the report with key words such as “novel”, “opportunistic”, “first
 description”, “not noted before”, “unusual”, etc. Two variables are
 provided for species foraging innovations: the total number of innovations
 reported (<strong>TotalInnovations</strong>) and a binary
 variable with 0 for species with 0 innovation reported, and 1 for species
 with at least 1 innovation reported
 (<strong>InnovationYesOrNo</strong>). In addition,
 we distinguished “consumer” innovations (new behaviours involving slight
 changes, such as the incorporation of new foods in a species diet) and
 “technical” innovations. Technical innovations refer to reports where the
 author describes the searching and handling technique itself as novel,
 regardless of whether the food type was novel or not. The dataset includes
 the numbers of <strong>technical </strong>and
 <strong>consumer</strong> innovations, and binary variables
 with 0 for species with no consumer/technical innovation reported, and 1
 for species with at least 1 consumer/technical innovation
 reported. <strong>IUCN
 data:</strong> <strong>Extinction
 risk</strong>, <strong>CriterionB</strong> (binary
 variable determining whether a species was considered at risk of
 extinction because of its small range), <strong>population
 trend</strong>, threat exposure
 (<strong>HabitatDestruction</strong>,
 <strong>InvasiveSpecies</strong>,
 <strong>Overexploitation</strong>), urbanisation
 (<strong>Urban</strong>: binary variable with 0 for non-urban
 species, 1 for species occuring in urban habitats) and geographic region
 (<strong>BiogeographicRange</strong>) were obtained from the
 IUCN website in February 2019.
 <strong>Covariables:</strong>
 Information for all other variables were obtained from a
 diversity of sources listed below (see details in the article's
 methods). Body <strong>mass </strong>is in g,
 <strong>generation time</strong> in years.
 <strong>Research effort</strong> is the number of papers
 published on each species between 1978 and 2008 according to the online
 version of the Zoological Record (from Ducatez & Lefebvre
 2014). Species <strong>insularity </strong>was coded as 0 for
 mainland species and 1 for insular species; <strong>migratory
 behaviour</strong> as 1 for sedentary or nomadic species, 2
 for altitudinal migrant and 3 for long distance migrant. As an index of
 <strong>habitat breadth</strong>, we used a recently developed
 index based on patterns of species co-occurrence within 101 habitat
 categories. Briefly, a species was allocated a quantitative score based on
 the diversity of other taxa with which it co-occurs, such that a
 generalist species is one that occurs in a range of habitat categories
 that vary considerably in species composition, whereas a specialist
 species is found only in habitats that contain a consistent suite of other
 species (index available for all terrestrial vertebrates in Ducatez et al.
 2014). We measured <strong>diet breadth</strong> by counting
 the number of food categories consumed by adults of each species, using
 six food categories: vertebrate carrion, vertebrate prey, invertebrate
 prey, nectar or pollen, fruit or seeds, and leaves or stems (source for
 the food categories for each bird species: Wilman et al. 2014).
   Data sources:  Birdlife
 International. http://datazone.birdlife.org/home (2019).
 del Hoyo, J., Elliott, A., Sargatal, J., Christie, D. A.
 & de Juana, E. Handbook of the Birds of the World alive. Lynx
 Edicions, Barcelona. Retrieved from www.hbw.com in November 2017.
 (2017). Ducatez, S. & Lefebvre, L. Patterns of
 Research Effort in Birds. <i>PLoS ONE</i>
 <b>9</b>, e89955 (2014). Ducatez, S.,
 Tingley, R. & Shine, R. Using species co-occurrence patterns to
 quantify relative habitat breadth in terrestrial vertebrates.
 <i>Ecosphere</i> <b>5</b>, art152
 (2014). Dunning, J. B. <i>CRC Handbook of Avian
 Body Masses</i>. (CRC Press, Inc., 2007). IUCN.
 The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species Version 2019-1. <i>IUCN Red
 List of Threatened Species</i> https://www.iucnredlist.org/en
 (2019). Jetz, W., Thomas, G. H., Joy, J. B., Hartmann,
 K. & Mooers, A. O. The global diversity of birds in space and
 time. <i>Nature</i> <b>491</b>, 444–448
 (2012). Wilman, H. <i>et al.</i>
 EltonTraits 1.0: Species-level foraging attributes of the world’s birds
 and mammals. <i>Ecology</i> <b>95</b>, 2027–2027
 (2014).
description: Population trend was unknown for 633 species (coded as
 "NA" in the <strong>TrendCode
 </strong>column). The R code used to analyse this
 dataset is also provided.