Quantifying spatial variation in the size and structure of ecologically stratified communities

Data used in the application of the multi-region community model (MRCM) to detection non-detection data collected from bird communities in R=8 geographically distinct regions in northern Italy. We augmented the data for all regions such that M = M_r = 200, i.e., by 200-n_r species for each region. The data file contains the following objects: (i) dataREG: region-specific covariates; (ii) guild: species-by-region matrix indicating the functional group to which each species belongs; (iii) K_tot: number of sampling occasions for each site in each region; (iv) M: total number of species in the augmented data set; (v) mass: body mass (in grams) for each species in each region; (vi) nsites: total number of sites per region; (vii) nspecies: total number of observed species for each region; (viii) species: scientific name of each species observed in each region; (ix) Yaug_tot: augmented species-by-sites-by-region detection frequency matrix