Mammalian carnivores are considered a key group in maintaining ecological health and can indicate potential ecological integrity in landscapes where they occur. Carnivores also hold high conservation value and their habitat requirements can guide management and conservation plans. The order Carnivora has 84 species from 8 families in the Neotropical region: Canidae; Felidae; Mephitidae; Mustelidae; Otariidae; Phocidae; Procyonidae; and Ursidae. Herein, we include published and unpublished data on native terrestrial Neotropical carnivores (Canidae; Felidae; Mephitidae; Mustelidae; Procyonidae; and Ursidae). NEOTROPICAL CARNIVORES is a publicly available data set that includes 99,605 data entries from 35,511 unique georeferenced coordinates. Detection/non‐detection and quantitative data were obtained from 1818 to 2018 by researchers, governmental agencies, non‐governmental organizations, and private consultants. Data were collected using several methods including camera trapping, museum collections, roadkill, line transect, and opportunistic records. Literature (peer‐reviewed and grey literature) from Portuguese, Spanish and English were incorporated in this compilation. Most of the data set consists of detection data entries (n = 79,343; 79.7%) but also includes non‐detection data (n = 20,262; 20.3%). Of those, 43.3% also include count data (n = 43,151). The information available in NEOTROPICAL CARNIVORES will contribute to macroecological, ecological, and conservation questions in multiple spatio‐temporal perspectives. As carnivores play key roles in trophic interactions, a better understanding of their distribution and habitat requirements are essential to establish conservation management plans and safeguard the future ecological health of Neotropical ecosystems. Our data paper, combined with other large‐scale data sets, has great potential to clarify species distribution and related ecological processes within the Neotropics. There are no copyright restrictions and no restriction for using data from this data paper, as long as the data paper is cited as the source of the information used. We also request that users inform us of how they intend to use the data.

Ants, an ecologically successful and numerically dominant group of animals, play key ecological roles as soil engineers, predators, nutrient recyclers, and regulators of plant growth and reproduction in most terrestrial ecosystems. Further, ants are widely used as bioindicators of the ecological impact of land use. We gathered information of ant species in the Atlantic Forest of South America. The ATLANTIC ANTS data set, which is part of the ATLANTIC SERIES data papers, is a compilation of ant records from collections (18,713 records), unpublished data (29,651 records), and published sources (106,910 records; 1,059 references), including papers, theses, dissertations, and book chapters published from 1886 to 2020. In total, the data set contains 153,818 ant records from 7,636 study locations in the Atlantic Forest, representing 10 subfamilies, 99 genera, 1,114 ant species identified with updated taxonomic certainty, and 2,235 morphospecies codes. Our data set reflects the heterogeneity in ant records, which include ants sampled at the beginning of the taxonomic history of myrmecology (the 19th and 20th centuries) and more recent ant surveys designed to address specific questions in ecology and biology. The data set can be used by researchers to develop strategies to deal with different macroecological and region‐wide questions, focusing on assemblages, species occurrences, and distribution patterns. Furthermore, the data can be used to assess the consequences of changes in land use in the Atlantic Forest on different ecological processes. No copyright restrictions apply to the use of this data set, but we request that authors cite this data paper when using these data in publications or teaching events.

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Despite the increasing amount of knowledge available regarding the ecological interactions between species, the dynamics of anurans in aquatic environments are little explored and understood. In this way, our work aims to assess which factors influence the composition and the ecological interactions of hylid anurans in oxbow lakes in the middle Purus River, Amazonas. We sampled three lakes with high, medium and low levels of connectivity twice, once during the flood and then in drought hydrological regimes. Variations in the hylid anuran assemblages and ecological interactions were tested as function of environmental niche, food resources, level of connectivity and hydrological regime. The availability of environmental resources and the availability of food resources were the best factors that explain the distribution of hylid anurans, which were also highly dependent on the variations between the hydrological regimes. The interactions between anurans, macroinvertebrates and macrophytes showed a modular and specialized structure, which varied according to the connectivity and hydrological regime of the lakes. Connectance showed an increasing trend from high to low connectivity lakes, suggesting that anurans had low trophic and environmental specialization in lakes with low connectivity. Hylids found in the lake of medium connectivity had higher values of trophic specialization and modularity. Our results illustrate the role of river-lake connectivity and annual hydrological cycle to maintain the aquatic biota and their interactions, and highlight the importance of floating meadows for the maintenance of biodiversity in floodplains.