From http://www.esapubs.org/archive/ecol/E093/155/appendix-A.pdf (Appendix A of White et al 2012, quoting here from the pdf):
Birds (BBS)
We used community data collected in 2009 from 2,769 routes of the Breeding Bird Survey (Sauer et al. 2011) (BBS) and 1,999 counts of the Christmas Bird Count (National Audubon Society 2002) (CBC). BBS routes are 40 km long, each consisting of 50 three minute point counts, 800 m apart, sampled annually in June. The 2009 data include a total of 1,819,908 individuals representing 347 species of diurnal landbirds, with individual routes averaging 657.2 ± 323.9 individuals (range = 53 – 3,504) and 46 ± 13 species (range = 10 – 81).
Trees (FIA and Gentry)
We also used two existing data sets of species abundance for communities of trees, the USFS Forest Inventory Analysis program (U.S. Department of Agriculture 2010, Woudenberg et al. 2010, http://apps.fs.fed.us/fiadb-downloads/datamart.html) (FIA), and the Alwyn H. Gentry Forest Transect Data Set (Phillips and Miller 2002) (referred to herein as ‘Gentry’). We used one year of data (calendar year of sampling varies among plots) for FIA phase 2 plots that were sampled using the standardized methodology implemented in 1999 [see the FIA National Core Field Guide for more information (U.S. Department of Agriculture 2010)]. The standard plot consists of four 24.0-foot (7.32 m) radius subplots, on which trees 5.0 inches (12.7 cm) and greater in diameter are identified to species and measured. We used species abundance data for 10,355 FIA plots, encompassing a total of 380,581 individuals and 236 species, with plots averaging 36.8 ± 12.5 individuals (range = 11 – 118) and 11.4 ± 1.6 species (range = 10 – 21). The Gentry data were collected from 226-0.1 hectare sites throughout the world, with each site sampled once over the course of a 22 year period. At each site, all plants with stem diameters of 2.5 cm or greater were identified and measured along ten 2 × 50 m transects. It should be noted that, due to difficulties in the taxonomy and identification of tropical trees, some species in the Gentry dataset are identified only as morpho-species (unique within sites), and species’ names vary among sites due to both typographical errors and synonymy problems. Since we only analyzed data within a site, these issues do not affect our analyses, but they artificially elevate the count of species in the Gentry dataset and therefore the number of species included in the overall analysis. We used data from 222 sites, including 67,405 individuals representing approximately 7,300 species, with individual sites averaging 303.6 ± 115.6 individuals (range = 44 – 779) and approximately 91.4 ± 59.7 species (range = 10 – 250).
MCDB
We used species abundance data for the 103 sites included in the Mammal Community Database (Thibault et al. 2011) (MCDB) that included at least 10 species (mean richness = 13.6 ± 4.0 species; range = 10 – 34). These data have been compiled from various published sources and therefore have not been collected using a standardized protocol across sites. As a result, these data are species-level abundances of small mammals that were captured using various levels of sampling effort spread across varying amounts of time and space. Despite these limitations, these data represent, to our knowledge, the largest collection of mammal community data ever analyzed in one study. The data encompass a total of 380 mammal species and 94,866 individuals (mean abundance per site = 921.0 ± 1,434.9; range = 19 – 10,085).
Misc Abund
From https://github.com/weecology/sad-comparison/blob/master/chapter1.md Baldridge's dissertation ch. 1
Data on Actinopterygii, Reptilia, Coleoptera, Arachnida, and Amphibia, were mined from literature by Baldridge and are publicly available [@Baldridge2013] (see Table 1 for details). These data were collected at the level of the site defined in the publication if raw data were available at that scale, and at the scale of the entire study otherwise. Time scales of collection for this data depended on the study but was typically one or a few years.