This data set includes longitudinal occurrence of bird species at 36 forest plots – half of which burned during the 2015-16 El Niño drought – distributed across a gradient of prior human disturbance in the Brazilian Amazon. Data was collected in 2010 and 2016 (around 6 years before, and one year after the 2015-16 El Niño, respectively) as part of the projects 'Assessing ENSO-induced Fire Impacts in tropical Rainforest Ecosystems' (AFIRE) and 'Biodiversity and Ecosystem Functioning in degraded and recovering Amazonian and Atlantic Forests' (ECOFOR), within the NERC Human-Modified Tropical Forest (HTMF) programme. Full details about this dataset can be found at https://doi.org/10.5285/4b05caee-a3c8-46a7-b675-e5a94554bd9f
