Frame redundancy and Beurling density

We show that the frame measure function of a frame in certain reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces on metric measure spaces is given by the reciprocal of the Beurling density of its index set. In addition, we show that each such frame with Beurling density greater than one contains a subframe with Beurling density arbitrary close to one. This confirms that the concept of frame measure function as introduced by Balan and Landau is a meaningful quantitative definition for the redundancy of a large class of infinite frames. In addition, it shows that the necessary density conditions for sampling in reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces obtained by Führ, Gröchenig, Haimi, Klotz and Romero are optimal. As an application, we also settle the open questions of the existence of frames near the critical density for exponential frames on unbounded sets and for nonlocalized Gabor frames. The techniques used in this paper combine a selector form of Weaver's conjecture and various methods for quantifying the overcompleteness of frames.