Data for: From understory to canopy: transmission of frog calls in a tropical wet forest

To attract mates, organisms relying on advertisement signals must encode relevant information and transmit it to target receivers; yet the effectiveness of this process is fundamentally mediated by the environment. The acoustic adaptation hypothesis (AAH) proposes that habitat properties impose selective forces on the design of acoustic signals to improve transmission efficiency. In tropical forests, the pronounced vertical heterogeneity in microhabitats creates a variety of conditions for signalers, raising the question of how call height influences signal transmission efficiency across forest strata. However, how microhabitat variation within forests, particularly along the vertical axis, modulates signal transmission remains poorly understood. We quantified the transmission of acoustic signals using the calls for advertisement of 24 species from a Neotropical Anuran community, broadcasting the calls from an understudied dimension of the forest, the canopy, and the understory. Across species, calls showed lower transmission performance in the canopy than in the understory, regardless of the species' natural calling height. Furthermore, transmission performance did not differ consistently among species occupying different vertical strata, nor aligned with AAH predictions. Although our results are not consistent with AAH, they suggest that habitat properties that vary with height, such as vegetation architecture and background noise, likely modulate signal transmission, increasing excess attenuation, degradation, and reverberation. Taken together, our findings indicate that the vertical structure of the forest affects signal transmission in unpredictable ways, since microhabitats do not consistently promote convergence in signal structure between species using similar call heights. This study emphasizes that the complex nature of vertical forest microhabitats can affect signal transmission in different types of forests and sensory modalities, ultimately modulating the evolution of signal design.