Available distribution datasets used to assess the range extantion of biological species are often at a species-level taxonomy. Because different taxonomy biases, many bird subspecies from the Neotropical region may deserve full species status. We provide range polygons for 3,990 subspecies of birds, representing 2,043 species from 65 families. All taxa are from the Amazon region, which includes the entire Amazon basin, the east slope of tropical Andes, French Guiana, Suriname, Guyana, south Venezuela (Bolivar and Amazonas departments), parts of the Brazilian Cerrado, and the Araguaia-Tocantins basin. These new maps of Amazonian bird subspecies distributions will improve and refine analyses on biodiversity studies (e.g. macroecology, evolution, conservation), and facilitate biogeographic, ecological, evolutionary, and conservation research on birds in the most biologically diverse region in the world.

To build the distribution maps we compiled a point-locality database of 620,000 records, 90% of which represent specimens vouchered in research collections. After manually cleaning and optimising the quality of the point localities, we generated extent-of-occurrence polygons at the subspecies level using a concave hull function. We corrected each polygon based on the literature and expert knowledge.