This dataset was created for our study on the impacts of linear infrastructure on the population abundance of vertebrate species. We obtained mean abundances and standard deviations of vertebrate populations in sites disturbed by infrastructure and corresponding undisturbed sites by searching for published peer-reviewed and grey literature. We extracted 3,912 pairwise abundance comparisons between disturbed and non-disturbed areas from 110 primary sources, spanning 26 countries and 6 continents and 160, 443, 97 and 92 species of mammals, birds, reptiles and amphibians, respectively. We also extracted the sample size and sampling effort per sample for each observation to perform meta-analyses per species group. Additionally, we extracted the mean distance to infrastructure in the disturbed sites to determine how infrastructure affects vertebrate populations as a function of distance and derive the mean infrastructure-effect zone for each species group using meta-regression models. Further, we extracted the type of infrastructure and habitat for each observation as well as the mean body mass for all species and diet for mammals and birds to determine how infrastructure impacts are modulated by environmental characteristics and species traits using meta-regressions.

The results of this research will be published as:

de Jonge, M. M. J., Gallego-Zamorano, J., Huijbregts, M. A. J., Schipper, A. M., & Benítez‐López, A. (in press). The impact of linear infrastructure on terrestrial vertebrate populations: A trait-based approach. Global Change Biology

This dataset, as well as the R scripts for the corresponding analysis and the full fitted models are available at: https://github.com/MelindadeJonge/Infrastructure_MetaAnalysis.

The data is stored in 4 files ●2022_deJonge_Dataset_092022.csv: The full dataset including the sample size, mean abundance, standard deviation of the mean, habitat type, infrastructure type, source, location, species, and quality of each observation. For a description of how the data was extracted we refer the reader to: 2022_deJonge_Methodology_092022.pdf ●2022_deJonge_speciesList_092022.csv: a list of all species included in the database together with their identification code, body mass (g), diet (only for mammals and birds) and body length (mm, only for amphibians).
●2022_deJonge_CrossswalkInfrastructure.csv: Crosswalk to link the habitat types as reported in the database to a binary classification (open/closed). ●2022_deJonge_CrosswalkHabitat.csv: Crosswalk to link the infrastructure types as reported in the database to the classification scheme used in the analysis (paved roads, unpaved roads, powerlines, other non-traffic infrastructure).

Additional information An overview of the definitions and units of the variables in each file is given in the codebook: “2022_deJonge_Codebook_092022.pdf” A description of the methodology used to obtain the data is given in ‘2022_deJonge_Methodology_092022.pdf” A list of all data sources is given in “2022_deJonge_dataSources.pdf”