DOI: 10.5061/dryad.1ns1rn92f
title: Assembly, persistence, and disassembly dynamics of Quaternary Caribbean frugivore communities

description: How communities assemble and restructure is of critical importance to
 ecological theory, evolutionary theory, and conservation, but long-term
 perspectives on the patterns and processes of community assembly are
 rarely integrated into traditional community ecology, and the utility of
 communities as an ecological concept has been repeatedly questioned in
 part due to a lack of temporal perspective. Through a synthesis of
 paleontological and neontological data, I reconstruct Caribbean frugivore
 communities over the Quaternary (2.58 mya – present). Numerous Caribbean
 frugivore lineages arise during periods coincident with the global origins
 of plant-frugivore mutualisms. The persistence of many of these lineages
 into the Quaternary is indicative of long-term community stability, but an
 analysis of Quaternary extinctions reveals a non-random loss of
 large-bodied mammalian and reptilian frugivores. Anthropogenic impacts,
 including human niche construction, underlie the recent reorganization of
 frugivore communities, setting the stage for continued declines and
 evolutionary responses in plants that have lost mutualistic partners.
 These impacts also support ongoing and future introductions of invader
 complexes: introduced plants and frugivores that further exacerbate native
 biodiversity loss by interacting more strongly with one another than with
 native plants or frugivores. This work illustrates the importance of
 paleontological data and perspectives in conceptualizing ecological
 communities, which are dynamic and important entities.
description: This dataset is a collation of body size data in the form of body
 mass for frugivorous birds, mammals, and reptiles in the Caribbean, both
 past and present. Extinct and extant frugivores were identified through
 literature review of previously published datasets and natural history
 accounts. In cases where direct body size measurements were not available,
 body size was estimated using allometric equations as described in the
 paper. Frugivores were classified based on their geographic distribution
 within the Caribbean (Greater Antilles, Bahamian Archipelago, and/or
 Lesser Antilles), their extinction status, and their status as either a
 native or introduced species. Statistical analyses were conducted across
 geographic realms, taxonomic groups, and time periods.
description: # Assembly, persistence, and disassembly dynamics of Quaternary Caribbean
 frugivore communities
 [https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.1ns1rn92f](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.1ns1rn92f) Supplementary Table 1 (Sup1_Caribbean_Frugivore_Dataset_03062024.csv) is the full dataset of frugivores used in this study. 03112024_Frugivore_Code.R is the R code used for statistical analyses in this study. ## Description of the data and file structure Supplementary Table 1 is necessary to run the R code 03112024_Frugivore_Code.R Table 1 has 10 columns with the following headers: 1. Class: The taxonomic class of the organism in the row. 2. Order: the taxonomic order of the organism in the row. 3. Family: the taxonomic family of the organism in the row. 4. Species: the species name of the organism in the row. 5. Extinction.Status: the extinction status of the organism in the row. It is either "extant" or "extinct." 6. Native.Status: whether the species is native or introduced to the biogeographic region of the Caribbean (see column 9). 7. Mass: the mass (in g) of the species. 8. IUCN: The IUCN Redlist status. 9. Region: the region(s) where the species is found with the extinction and native status indicated in the row. "BAH" stands for Bahamas, "LA" the Lesser Antilles, "GA" the Greater Antilles 10. Data Sources: literature from which data were gathered