carriondata database used to assess carrion decomposition. It allowed us to assess the effect of decomposition as a function of the treatments, study areas, and carrion location (tree cavities/ground). Data was collected from an exclusion experiment carried out in a Mediterranean ecosystem (see above for more details).

antcommunity: contains data of the ant community sampled during the decomposition experiment. This was used to evaluate differences between the ant communities  based on the study area and the pitfall location (ground or tree cavity) and to compare community diversities using the Hutcheson t-test.

LDA_result: This file contains the matrix resulting from the discriminant analysis. This matrix was useful for creating a figure of our ant communities.

phylogeneticdata:  contains  different functional traits  for each of the ant species of our ant community (data obtained from Arnán et al. 2012 and Retana et al. 2015). Together with the published phylogenetic tree of the European species assembled by Xavier Arnán and Xim Cerdá (2015) we performed our phylogenetic comparative analyses to identify the main factors driving scavenging behaviour in our study area. We made a pre-selection of all functional traits previous to the analyses.

survivaldata: Contains data used to evaluate carrion detection by vertebrates.

relativecontributioncarrion: contains data to assess the relative contribution of vertebrates and invertebrates to the total mass removed (in grams) in each microhabitat (tree cavity/ground) and land management (pastureland/cereal field).

Columns in carriondata.xlsx

1. ID: Numerical identifier for each piece of carrion.
2. Tree_ID: Identifier for the tree associated with the carrion sample (paired design).
3. carrion_treatment: treatment applied to the carrion (EV= vertebrate exclusion; EI=vertebrate+invertebrate exclusion;NE=control).
4. study_area: The specific area where the carrion was located (bec_con=becerra; alicun=alicun).
5. time: days of the experiment (1-12 days). Day 1 corresponds to the initial carrion weights.
6. weight: The weight of the carrion at a given day (g)
7. carrion_location: ground or tree cavity.

Columns in antcommunity.xlsx

1. Tree_ID:  A number that identifies each paired of pitfalls (pitfall in tree cavity and pitfall on the ground).
2. study_area: The specific area where the carrion was located (bec_con=becerra; alicun=alicun).
3. carrion_location: ground or tree cavity.
4. Species columns (25 ant species): These represent different ant species found in the community, sampled by pitfalls. The column headers are composed of the first three letters of the genus and the first three letters of the species name. For more details on species names, please refer to Table 2 of the article (Salido et al., 2024).

Columns in LDA_results.xlsx

1. group: variable grouping the location (cavity or ground) along with the study area (Becerra/Conejo).
2. LDA1: Contains the scores accounting for the maximum variance between our groups (resulting from the linear discriminant analysis).
3. LDA2: Contains the scores accounting for the second most significant variance between our groups (resulting from the linear discriminant analysis).
4. Freq: Details the frequency of those scores.

Columns in phylogeneticdata.xlsx

1. species: contains the names of the different species from our ant community in each row.
2. presence_carrion: indicates whether an ant species was observed feeding on carrion during the decomposition experiment (0 = absent, 1 = present).
3. tree: indicates whether a particular species is considered arboreal (0 = not arboreal, 1 = arboreal).
4. ws: worker size; worker body size from the tip of mandibles to tip of the gaster (mm)
5. wp: species polymorphism; mean worker size divided by the range of worker size (mm)
6. diur: indicates whether a species is considered diurnal (0 = not diurnal, 1 = diurnal).
7. dom: indicates whether a species is considered dominant (0 = not dominant, 1 = dominant).
8. fsi: the species forages individually (0 = no, 1 = yes).
9. fsg: the species forages in groups (0 = no, 1 = yes).
10. fsc: the species forages collectively (0 = no, 1 = yes).
11. cs: colony size; mean number of workers per colony, ln transformed.
12. nq: number of queens (0= Monongyny; 0.5=Both monogyny and polygyny; 1= Polygyny).
13. nn: number of nests (0= Monongyny; 0.5=Both monogyny and polygyny; 1= Polygyny).
14. cft: colony foundation type (0= DCF "dependent colony foundation"; 0.5= Both DCF and ICF; 1= ICF "independent colony foundation")

Columns in survivaldata.xlsx

1. ID: Numerical identifier for each piece of carrion.
2. time: Days until the carrion was detected (when a piece of carrion disappears or a cage was moved from its initial position).
3. location: tree cavity or ground.
4. status: 0 if not detected, 1 if detected.
5. area: Study area, referring to different types of land management. Bec_con indicates a less transformed pastureland, while Alicun indicates a more transformed cereal field.

Columns in relativecontributioncarrion.xlsx

1. carriontreatment: for this analysis we only consider i) vertebrate_exclusion: accessible only to invertebrates and ii) free_access: accessible to both vertebrates and invertebrates.

2. location: tree cavity or ground.

3. degree_habitattransf: refers to the type of land management in the study areas (pastureland or cereal_field).

4. total_eliminado: total mass removed after the decomposition experiment (in grams).

   Meaning of Empty Fields in datasets

   Empty fields correspond to unobserved or unavailable data; they do not represent zero values and should be treated as missing data (NA).

Experimental methodology

Carrion decomposition experiment consisted in exposing 120 pieces of chicken breast (referred to as "carrion") to three different treatments: vertebrate exclusion (accessible only to invertebrates), vertebrate+invertebrate exclusion (accessible only to flying insects) and control or free access (accessible to both vertebrates and invertebrates). These was done in two different study area with different land management practices (less transformed pastureland and more transformed cereal field). Decomposition was evaluated in a paired design (20 pairs, 10 pairs/study area) were we randomly select holm oak trees and exposed simultaneously 3 treatments within cavities and 3 treatments on the ground. Carrion was weighed daily (12 days).

During the first two days of the experiment ant community was sampled by pitfalls traps in these pairs tree cavity-ground.

Except for the phylogenetic data, the rest of datasets were created from our field-collected data.