This data and metadata was collected through a systematic literature review. The data includes ecological thresholds of forest cover identified by authors in peer-reviewer publications, represented as a percentage forest cover after which a non-linear decline is measured in a biodiversity metric. Data includes the geographic region and location in which the ecological thresholds was measured, landscape characteristics, the species and biodiversity metrics used to identify the thresholds, and other study site and methodological information. This data is associated to a Review article published in Biotropica, Shennan-Farpón et al. (2021).