Data and code for: Phenological mismatch weakens bird-mediated top-down control in a tri-trophic oak forest system

This dataset and accompanying R code support the analyses presented in: Franzén et al. "Phenological mismatch weakens bird-mediated top-down control in a tri-trophic oak forest system" (submitted to Ecology Letters).The study combines landscape-scale phenological monitoring with a bird-exclusion experiment across ten oak (Quercus robur) woodland sites in southern Sweden during spring 2023. We quantified phenology across three trophic levels (oak budburst, caterpillar herbivores via frassfall, and insectivorous birds via passive acoustic monitoring) and tested whether phenological mismatch between birds and their caterpillar prey affects the strength of bird-mediated top-down control of herbivory.Contents include: (1) Site-level phenological metrics (oak budburst, herbivore activity centres, bird activity centres, predator phenology) (2) Tree-level herbivory measurements from exclusion and control branches (3) Cumulative frassfall biomass data (4) R scripts for all statistical analyses (Q1–Q5), including regression models, model comparison (AICc), and bootstrap confidence intervals