A database of foraging guilds of seabirds

The foraging guilds of terrestrial birds have been a focus of past studies, however little is known about the guilds in seabirds, except for certain species and localities. To overcome this gap, here we developed the Foraging Guilds of Seabirds database (FGSdb) by compiling a global database of 311 seabird species (from a total of 346 known, representing 90% of all seabird species) and assigning to each of them their diet types and foraging strategy. Diets included categories such as mollusks and fish and strategies included categories such as diving or aerial capture. In turn, both diets and strategies were classified into subcategories, such as herbivores and surface foragers, respectively. Across all seabirds, there were 22 types of diets and 30 types of strategies to capture prey. The number of diet categories for a species varied between 1 and 11, and the number of strategies varied from 1 to 9. We provide R code to exemplify how to use the database to, for example, get the number of species that belong to a certain category. Our database provides a useful resource database for future studies in evolutionary ecology. For instance, could reveal different statistical patterns and be integrated with other types of data, e.g. body size, to analyze the evolutionary constraints associated with the inter-specific variation in these foraging traits. Future extensions of this work include extending this database to other birds or animal groups and developing a GUI to explore the data.