DOI: 10.5061/dryad.1vhhmgqrw
title: Conspecific attraction for conservation and management of terrestrial breeding birds: current knowledge and future research directions

description: Conspecific presence can indicate the location or quality of resources,
 and animals settling near conspecifics often gain fitness benefits. This
 can result in adaptive conspecific attraction during breeding habitat
 selection as demonstrated in numerous terrestrial, territorial birds.
 There is growing interest in using simulated conspecific social cues
 (e.g., decoys, broadcasted vocalizations) to manage bird distributions,
 yet it remains unclear when this approach is likely to succeed.
 We reviewed published studies to evaluate whether the strength of
 conspecific attraction in terrestrial birds is mediated by characteristics
 of species (life history traits), simulated cues (e.g., timing and
 duration), sites (e.g., quality), and how conspecific attraction was
 measured. We identified 31 experiments that simulated social cues
 and compared conspecific settlement between treatment and control sites.
 We then used phylogenetically controlled meta-regression to assess impacts
 of 19 moderators on settlement. Nearly all species included in these
 experiments were migratory passerines, and social cues generally had a
 strong, positive influence on their settlement decisions, as the odds of
 site occupancy were 3.12× (95% CI = 0.81, 11.69) greater in treatment
 sites relative to control sites. Within this group, conspecific
 attraction was evolutionarily conserved with ≥ 25.5% (CI = 5.1%, 65.4%) of
 the variance in treatment effects explained by phylogenetic relatedness.
 However, we found no evidence that any covariates influenced the response
 to social cues, and we posit this stems from limited research specifically
 designed to identify the mechanisms mediating conspecific attraction.
 We therefore developed a research agenda that provides a
 framework for testing mechanistic hypotheses regarding how cue
 characteristics, species traits, and spatial contexts may mediate
 attraction to conspecifics. Evaluating these hypotheses will greatly
 advance the field by helping managers understand when, where, and why
 simulating social cues can be used to enhance populations of species that
 are of conservation concern.
description: This dataset has been formatted using Tidy data principles
 (Wickham 2014). That is, each observational unit is stored in its own
 table, each observation is a row, and each variable is a column.  There is
 a meta-data tab included in the Excel workbook (data) that explains all
 variables in each table, and Appendix C of the manuscript's
 supplementary materials provides additional details about how moderators
 were aggregated and quantified.  We have also included the R code
 (dataAnalysis) required to import these data and perform all analyses in
 the manuscript.  Finally, the file output.nex is a random sample of 1000
 Ericson backbone trees (Jetz et al. 2012; http://birdtree.org/) that is
 used to calculate an average phylogenetic tree in the analyses.
 Jetz, W., G. H. Thomas, J. B. Joy, K. Harmann, and A. O. Mooers
 (2012). The global diversity of birds in space and time. Nature
 491:444-448. Wickham, H. (2014). Tidy data. Journal of
 Statistical Software 59:10.