Data accessibility

The data used in this study are already entirely in the public domain. The Gentry forest plot data set (Gentry, 1988, Phillips & Miller, 2002) is accessible through the Botanical Information and Ecology Network (BIEN, https://bien.nceas.ucsb.edu/bien/). The RLS dataset of global reef fish abundance and biomass (Edgar et al., 2020; Edgar & Stuart-Smith, 2014) is accessible through the Australian Ocean Data Network (AODN, https://portal.aodn.org.au/).