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Project Thought: Diet Characterization #16

Open IJBG opened 3 months ago

IJBG commented 3 months ago

Grace's frontiers paper talks about using the Avian Diet Database to characterize diet niche in a finer manner than 'invertebrates' - investigate use of avian diet database for this purpose

IJBG commented 3 months ago

"To measure diet niche, we obtained categorical diet data from EltonTraits (Wilman et al., 2014), and calculated the Shannon evenness index (Shannon, 1948) of the proportion of diet in each category for each species as done in previous studies (e.g., Santini et al., 2019; Huang et al., 2021). Diet categories include invertebrates, endotherms, ecotherms, fish, scavenging, nectar, seeds, and plants."

(Di Cecco & Hurlbert 2022 Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution)

IJBG commented 3 months ago

There's species eg. Yellow-Throated Warbler where the information on ADD is that diet is 100% insects. Definitely some where the diet is broken out further, but I think the method would be better applied to a subset of diets eg. within insectivores, which species have diets broken down into more granular categories. Asking a question about diet niche breadth within insectivores and the role that plays in population declines Would be really interesting and ought to be asked on a broader scale than the mbbs - that's a question where bbs or ebird trends could come in for information about the whole continent.