Passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) is increasingly popular in ecological research, but recording and analyzing large amounts of data is still a critical bottleneck for the long-term monitoring of multiple species. The data we made available here is composed of species lists made by specialists’ direct inspection of 14,044 one-minute recordings. These data sets were collected across different habitats in South America to evaluate how temporal and spatial sampling effort affects species diversity estimates for bird and anuran communities. These data sets are: (#1 & #2) Generic & optimized sampling of the birds from Caatinga; (#3 & #4) Generic & optimized sampling of the birds from Inland Atlantic Forest; (#5) Coastal Atlantic Forest; (#6) Focused sampling of the birds from Cerrado; (#8) Generic sampling of the Amphibian from the Coastal Atlantic Forest; (#9) Generic sampling of the Amphibian from Inland Atlantic Forest.