DOI: 10.5061/dryad.547d7wmg9
title: Trophic and non-trophic seasonal interaction network for boreal forest tetrapods

description: Aim: Understanding the organization of the wide variety of ecological
 interactions is crucial to advancing our understanding and management of
 real ecosystems. We aimed to compile a “complete” network of tetrapod
 trophic and non-trophic interactions for the entire North American boreal
 forest biome that could be analyzed to gain insights into community
 organization and function. In particular, we aimed to identify
 functionally important units (modules) and species within the boreal
 network, and to compare how these changed seasonally and with the
 inclusion of non-trophic interactions. Location: Boreal North America Time
 period: 1950 – present day Major taxa studied: Tetrapods Methods: We
 compiled published ecological interactions for boreal tetrapods into a
 food web (trophic interactions) and inclusive network (trophic and
 non-trophic interactions). We partitioned interactions by season, creating
 four networks representing the two network types per season. We examined
 how the modular structure, composition of modules, assortativity of traits
 within modules, and importance of different species compared across these
 networks. Results: We compiled a network of 5037 ecological interactions
 between 421 boreal tetrapod species. Most of these interactions (87%)
 occur in summer. The summer and winter boreal food webs and inclusive
 networks are modular (i.e., contain subsets of species interacting more
 with each other than with species outside of the subset). Several species
 attributes explain which species assort together into modules, including
 physical and behavioural traits, taxonomic class, and trophic niche. A
 small set of species come out as most functionally important (central,
 module hubs, or responsible for the greatest network change when
 non-trophic interactions are included) across all versions of the network,
 and other species are important within a certain season or interaction
 context. Main conclusions: Potential conservation management units
 (modules) exist in the boreal forest network, and considering species’
 function at the community level highlights new priorities for
 species-level management.
description: Using a systematic search, trophic and non-trophic interactions
 between tetrapod species of the North American boreal forest were
 extracted from the literature. All extant tetrapods that regularly live,
 breed, or migrate in the nearly 600 million hectares of the North American
 boreal biome were included. Wild, non-native species known to occur in
 self-sustaining populations were included, such as feral horses. Not all
 are woodland species, as the boreal biome encompasses wetlands, urban
 areas, meadows, and some agricultural matrix. Given the wide scope of
 possible non-trophic interactions and varying degrees of ecological
 importance, the non-trophic interaction search focused primarily on
 interactions that affected nesting or denning, feeding, and access to
 territory, because these non-trophic interactions include both summer and
 winter processes and can affect species distributions and individual
 survival in an obvious way. We included only recorded ecological
 interactions. Species other than terrestrial tetrapods were classified
 into groups, as it was infeasible to include every organism at the species
 level for this spatial scale, and species-level information was often
 lacking. We treated these groups as nodes that could be the
 "giver" or the "receiver" of an interaction, like the
 species-level nodes in the network.
description: # Trophic and non-trophic seasonal interaction network for boreal forest
 tetrapods
 [https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.547d7wmg9](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.547d7wmg9) ### Contents: **Data:** interaction_data.csv - lists 6465 known trophic and non-trophic interactions between boreal forest tetrapod species, the season in which they occur, and the literature reference code(s) for each interaction data_references.csv - lists the full references corresponding to each reference code in the interaction data set boreal_trait_table.csv - lists species traits for the 429 tetrapod species in the data set **R code:** modul_assort_analysis.R - script for the analysis of assortativity of species traits into network modules in Daly et al. [accepted 2024], *Global Ecology and Biogeography*. communities_eigen.R - script for module identification analysis in Daly et al. [accepted 2024], *Global Ecology and Biogeography*. deltacon.R - script for the analysis of which nodes were responsible for the greatest change in network structure when non-trophic interactions were added to the food web, for summer and winter respectively, in Daly et al. [accepted 2024], *Global Ecology and Biogeography*. ## Description of the data and file structure ### interaction\_data.csv *Variable descriptions:* **interaction_type** - trophic or non-trophic. Trophic indicates a feeding interaction. Non-trophic indicates a non-feeding interaction (e.g., communal feeding or nesting, pollination, mobbing, kleptoparasitism, food provision, brood parasitism, etc.) **given_species** - the "giver" of the interaction effect. E.g., in a trophic interaction, this is the species that eats the other species. In most cases, this is a tetrapod species. However, species other than terrestrial tetrapods were not included with species-level resolution, and were instead classified into species groups, such as "Graminoids", "Deciduous trees", "Fish", etc. **interaction** - specifies the interaction type, and the effect on the "giver" and "receiver" of the interaction in parentheses. For example, (+/-) means that the given_species benefits, and there is a cost to the target_species. **target_species** - the "receiver" of the interaction effect. E.g., in a trophic interaction, this is the species that gets eaten. In most cases, this is a tetrapod species. However, species other than terrestrial tetrapods were not included with species-level resolution, and were instead classified into species groups, such as "Graminoids", "Deciduous trees", "Fish", etc. **season** - the season that this interaction was documented in. Can take values of "summer" or "winter". Interactions that occur in both seasons are entered twice, with one row for each season. **Ref1, Ref2, Ref3, Ref4, Ref5** - Codes for literature reference(s) that describe the interaction described in that row. The full reference corresponding to each code is listed in the file data_references.csv. Every interaction has one to five associated references. NA values in the columns for the 2nd-5th references mean that we don't have additional references for those interactions. ### data\_references.csv *Variable descriptions:* **reference_ID** - reference code used in the file interaction_data.csv **citation** - full citation corresponding to the reference code ### **boreal\_trait\_table.csv** The trait and attribute data in this spreadsheet come from the AvoNet (Tobias et al., 2022) and AnimalTraits (Herberstein et al., 2022) databases, as well as from Supplementary Data 2 in Mendoza & Araújo (2019). Tobias, J. A., Sheard, C., Pigot, A. L., Devenish, A. J. M., Yang, J., Sayol, F., Neate-Clegg, M. H. C., Alioravainen, N., Weeks, T. L., Barber, R. A., Walkden, P. A., MacGregor, H. E. A., Jones, S. E. I., Vincent, C., Phillips, A. G., Marples, N. M., Montaño-Centellas, F. A., Leandro-Silva, V., Claramunt, S., … Schleuning, M. (2022). AVONET: Morphological, ecological and geographical data for all birds. *Ecology Letters*, *25*(3), 581–597. [https://doi.org/10.1111/ele.13898](https://doi.org/10.1111/ele.13898) Herberstein, M. E., McLean, D. J., Lowe, E., Wolff, J. O., Khan, M. K., Smith, K., Allen, A. P., Bulbert, M., Buzatto, B. A., Eldridge, M. D. B., Falster, D., Fernandez Winzer, L., Griffith, S. C., Madin, J. S., Narendra, A., Westoby, M., Whiting, M. J., Wright, I. J., & Carthey, A. J. R. (2022). AnimalTraits—A curated animal trait database for body mass, metabolic rate and brain size. *Scientific Data*, *9*(1), Article 1. [https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-022-01364-9](https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-022-01364-9) ## Sharing/Access information Interaction data were derived from the list of references in the file data_references.csv ## Code/Software All code is for R. R packages used are listed at the top of each script.