Data from: What North America's skeleton crew of megafauna tells us about community disassembly

Functional trait diversity is increasingly used to model future changes in community structure despite a poor understanding of community disassembly's effects on functional diversity. By tracking the functional diversity of the North American large mammal fauna through the End-Pleistocene megafaunal extinction and up to the present, I show that contrary to expectations, functionally unique species are no more likely to go extinct than functionally redundant species. This makes total functional richness loss no worse than expected given similar taxonomic richness declines. However, where current species sit in functional space relative to pre-anthropogenic baselines is not random and likely explains ecosystem functional changes better than total functional richness declines. Prehistoric extinctions have left many extant species functionally isolated and future extinctions will cause even more rapid drops in functional richness.Table S1Functional data for large North American mammals used in the analysis.Table S3Functional data for small, extinct North American mammals used in the analysis simulating total mammal functional diversity.Appendix S2The folder contains all the R script files and data used in the paper. Two datasets are trimmed .csv versions of Table S1 and S3 and the third is functional data for North American mammals from the EltonTraits 1.0 database. Wilman, H., Belmaker, J., Simpson, J., la Rosa, de, C., Rivadeneira, M. M., & Jetz, W. (2014). EltonTraits 1.0: species-level foraging attributes of the world's birds and mammals. Ecology, 95(7), 2027. To recreate all analyses and figures used in the paper, open the script "Davis Disassembly Main Code Open First.R", highlight all the text and click run. Make sure that all the script files and data .csv files are in the same folder and that that folder is set as your working directory.Appendix S1Supplementary methods, results, figures, and tables for the analysis.Davis Megafauna Dissasembly Appendix S1.doc