DOI: 10.5061/dryad.cc2fqz643
title: Data from: Homogenisation of carnivorous mammal ensembles caused by global range reductions of large-bodied hypercarnivores during the late Quaternary

description: Carnivorous mammals play crucial roles in ecosystems by influencing prey
 densities and behaviour, and recycling carrion. Yet, the influence of
 carnivores on global ecosystems has been affected by extinctions and range
 contractions throughout the Late Pleistocene and Holocene (~130 000 years
 ago to the current). Large-bodied mammals were particularly affected, but
 how dietary strategies influenced species’ susceptibility to geographic
 range reductions remains unknown. We investigated 1) the importance of
 dietary strategies in explaining range reductions of carnivorous mammals
 (≥5% vertebrate meat consumption), and 2) differences in functional
 diversity of continental carnivore ensembles by comparing current, known
 ranges to current, expected ranges under a present-natural counterfactual
 scenario. The present-natural counterfactual estimates current mammal
 ranges had modern humans not expanded out of Africa during the Late
 Pleistocene and were not a main driver of extinctions and range
 contractions, alongside changing climates. Ranges of large-bodied
 hypercarnivorous mammals are currently smaller than expected, compared to
 smaller-bodied carnivorous mammals that consume less vertebrate meat. This
 resulted in consistent differences in continental functional diversity,
 whereby current ensembles of carnivorous mammals have undergone
 homogenisation through structural shifts towards smaller-bodied
 insectivorous and herbivorous species. The magnitude of ensemble
 structural shift varied among continents, with Australia experiencing the
 greatest difference. Weighting functional diversity by species’ geographic
 range sizes caused a three-fold greater shift in ensemble centroids than
 when using presence-absence alone. Conservation efforts should acknowledge
 current reductions in the potential geographic ranges of large-bodied
 hypercarnivores and aim to restore functional roles in carnivore
 ensembles, where possible, across continents.
description: <strong>(1) Range data/species-site
 matrix:</strong> Data was initially accessed from
 the Phylogenetic Atlas of Mammals (Phylacine; Version 1.2) database: https://github.com/MegaPast2Future/PHYLACINE_1.2 Geographic range data, as rasters, were downloaded from Phylacine for the Current and Present-natural scenarios. All mammals had the values extracted from the raster layers and stored in columns to create a species-site matrix for all cells across the world.  Each cell was identified as (1) belonging to a specific continent, and (2) whether it was attached to the mainland during the last glacial maximum (to identify islands to include). <strong>(2) BBPMM model predictions on raw data</strong>  Predictions from a Binomial Bayesian Phylogenetic Mixed Model (BBPMM) on species-range losses.  Further methods in paper. <strong>(3) Species' geographic range rasters</strong> Methods in paper.
description: All data can be analysed using the code stored in a public
 repository on Github: https://github.com/osmiddleton/Middleton-et-al-2020-_Carnivore-ensemble-modification_ProcB.