Data from: Vegetation phenology and nest survival: diagnosing heterogeneous effects through time ...

• Main Authors: Ringelman, Kevin M., Skaggs, Cassandra G.
• Format: Dataset
• Language: English
• Published: Dryad 2019
• Subjects: Mareca strepera; Mareca americana; Spatula clypeata; nest; Aythya affinis; Anas crecca; Waterfowl; Spatula discors; Anas acuta; duck; robel; Anas platyrhynchos
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.5061/dryad.4j36s87; https://datadryad.org/stash/dataset/doi:10.5061/dryad.4j36s87

Birds should select nest sites that minimize predation risk, but understanding the influence of vegetation on nest survival has proven problematic. Specifically, the common practice of measuring vegetation on nest fate date can overestimate its effect on survival, simply because vegetation at hatched nests grows for a longer period of time than vegetation at nests that were depredated. Here, we sampled the literature to determine the prevalence of this bias in studies of duck breeding ecology. We then used survival data collected from ~2,800 duck nests to empirically evaluate evidence of bias in four different vegetation metrics: vegetation density measured when the nest was found, density when the nest was fated, and date-corrected regression residuals of these two. We also diagnosed the magnitude of vegetation effects on nest survival by restricting analysis to only nests which were fated contemporaneously (thereby removing potential bias in the timing of measurement). Finally, we examined whether ... : North Dakota duck nesting datasetThese are survival data for duck nests in North Dakota. Column headers are described in the publication. Nest fate information follows that required by program MARK accessed through the package RMark (see description by Rotella on the CRAN site).robel_2018.06.15.csv ...