The data consists of 3D surface scans of the beaks of 662 museum specimens of sixteen species (representing fifteen families of passerine birds: Fringillidae, Ploceidae, Passeridae, Viduidae, Thraupidae, Estrildidae, Artamidae, Cardinalidae, Sittidae, Prunellidae, Motacillidae, Emberizidae, Alaudidae, Cinclidae, Bombycillidae). Each species has scans from between 23 and 31 specimens with the exception of chaffinches (Fringilla coelebs), with scans from 230 specimens representing fourteen subspecies.

Processed data for reproducing figures and analyses in: "Innovation and elaboration on the avian tree of life".The corresponding code is available one GitHub: https://github.com/TGuillerme/elaboration_exploration_bird_beaks

Processed data for reproducing figures and analyses in: "Innovation and elaboration on the avian tree of life".The corresponding code is available one GitHub: https://github.com/TGuillerme/elaboration_exploration_bird_beaks

Data supporting manuscript: Hughes, E.C., Edwards, D.P. & Thomas, G.H. The homogenisation of avian morphological and phylogenetic diversity under the global extinction crisis. Current Biology.
SUMMARY Biodiversity is facing a global extinction crisis that will reduce ecological trait diversity, evolutionary history, and ultimately ecosystem functioning and services. A key challenge is understanding how species losses will impact morphological and phylogenetic diversity at global scale. Here, we test whether the loss of species threatened with extinction according to the IUCN leads to morphological and phylogenetic homogenisation across both the whole avian class, and within each biome and ecoregion globally. We use a comprehensive set of continuous morphological traits extracted from museum collections of 8455 bird species, including geometric morphometric beak shape data,9 and sequentially remove species from those at most to least threat of extinction. We find evidence of morphological, but not phylogenetic, homogenisation across the avian class, with species becoming more alike in terms of their morphology. We find that most biome and ecoregions are expected to lose morphological diversity at a greater rate than predicted by species loss alone, with the most imperilled regions found in East Asia and the Himalayan uplands and foothills. Only a small proportion of assemblages are threatened with phylogenetic homogenisation, in particular parts of Indochina. Species extinctions will lead to a major loss of avian ecological strategies, but not a comparable loss of phylogenetic diversity. As the decline of species with unique traits and their replacement with more widespread generalist species continues, the protection of assemblages at most risk of morphological and phylogenetic homogenisation should be a key conservation priority.

Avian specimens
Total of 5094 images are stored in the img folder. ground_truth.csv and prediction.csv are the ground truth and predicted points coordinates, each point has two columns, x and y coordinates. The colour_*.csv files are the colour information of specimen body regions.
Littorina shells
Total of 1410 images are in the dataset with 676 images in the release folder and 735 in the recapture folder. ground_truth.csv and prediction.csv are the ground truth and predicted points coordinates, each point has two columns, x and y coordinates.

Avian specimens
Total of 5094 images are stored in the img folder. ground_truth.csv and prediction.csv are the ground truth and predicted points coordinates, each point has two columns, x and y coordinates. The colour_*.csv files are the colour information of specimen body regions.
Littorina shells
Total of 1410 images are in the dataset with 676 images in the release folder and 735 in the recapture folder. ground_truth.csv and prediction.csv are the ground truth and predicted points coordinates, each point has two columns, x and y coordinates.

Processed data for reproducing figures and analyses in: "Innovation and elaboration on the avian tree of life".

Data supporting manuscript: Hughes, E.C., Edwards, D.P. & Thomas, G.H. The homogenisation of avian morphological and phylogenetic diversity under the global extinction crisis. Current Biology.
SUMMARY Biodiversity is facing a global extinction crisis that will reduce ecological trait diversity, evolutionary history, and ultimately ecosystem functioning and services. A key challenge is understanding how species losses will impact morphological and phylogenetic diversity at global scale. Here, we test whether the loss of species threatened with extinction according to the IUCN leads to morphological and phylogenetic homogenisation across both the whole avian class, and within each biome and ecoregion globally. We use a comprehensive set of continuous morphological traits extracted from museum collections of 8455 bird species, including geometric morphometric beak shape data,9 and sequentially remove species from those at most to least threat of extinction. We find evidence of morphological, but not phylogenetic, homogenisation across the avian class, with species becoming more alike in terms of their morphology. We find that most biome and ecoregions are expected to lose morphological diversity at a greater rate than predicted by species loss alone, with the most imperilled regions found in East Asia and the Himalayan uplands and foothills. Only a small proportion of assemblages are threatened with phylogenetic homogenisation, in particular parts of Indochina. Species extinctions will lead to a major loss of avian ecological strategies, but not a comparable loss of phylogenetic diversity. As the decline of species with unique traits and their replacement with more widespread generalist species continues, the protection of assemblages at most risk of morphological and phylogenetic homogenisation should be a key conservation priority.

For detailed information concerning data collection please see Gonzalez-Voyer et al. Sex roles in birds: phylogenetic analyses of the influence of climate, life histories and social environment. Ecology Letters. Briefly, data on ecology, life histories and behaviour of birds were extracted from published literature. If several data were available for a given species, we included the ones that were extracted from breeding individuals or had larger sample sizes. The details regarding data processing are provided in the Supplementary Material of Gonzalez-Voyer et al. (accepted).

Data supporting forthcoming manuscript: Hughes, E.C., Edwards, D.P., Bright, J.A., Capp, E.J.R., Cooney, C.R., Varley, Z.K. & Thomas, G.H. (Forthcoming). Global biogeographic patterns of avian morphological diversity. Ecology Letters.
Abstract:Understanding the biogeographical patterns, and evolutionary and ecological drivers, underpinning morphological diversity are key for determining its origins and conservation. Using a comprehensive set of continuous morphological traits extracted from museum collections of 8353 bird species, including geometric morphometric beak shape data, we find that avian morphological diversity is unevenly distributed globally, even after controlling for species richness, with exceptionally dense packing of species in hyper-diverse tropical hotspots. At the regional level, these areas also have high morphological variance, with species exhibiting high phenotypic diversity. Evolutionary history likely plays a key role in shaping these patterns, with evolutionarily old species contributing to niche expansion, and young species contributing to niche packing. Taken together, these results imply that the tropics are both ‘cradles’ and ‘museums’ of phenotypic diversity.