Spatial occurrence records and distributions of tropical Asian butterflies

Insect biogeography is poorly documented globally, particularly in the tropics. Recent intensive research in tropical Asia, combined with increasingly available records from citizen science, provides an opportunity to map the distributions of tropical Asian butterflies. We compiled a dataset of 724,247 occurrences of 3,591 tropical Asian butterfly species by aggregating records from GBIF (651,285 records), published literature (21,271), published databases (37,695), and unpublished data (13,993). Here, we present this dataset and single-species distribution maps of 1,520 species. Using these maps, along with records of the 2,071 remaining species, we identified areas of limited sampling (e.g., the Philippines, Myanmar, and New Guinea) and predicted areas of high diversity (Peninsular Malaysia and Borneo). This dataset can be leveraged for a range of studies on Asian and tropical butterflies, including 1) species biogeography, 2) sampling prioritization to fill gaps, 3) biodiversity hotspot mapping, and 4) conservation evaluation and planning. We encourage the continued development of this dataset and the associated code as a tool for the conservation of tropical Asian insects. DOI https://doi.org/10.32942/X2C904 Subjects Biodiversity, Entomology

insect biogeography, conservation, butterflies, lepidoptera Dates Published: 2024-07-27 11:31 License CC BY Attribution 4.0 International Additional Metadata Conflict of interest statement: None Data and Code Availability Statement: All code used to conduct synonym harmonization, preprocess environmental variables for SDMs, execute SDMs, process SDM outputs, and conduct point buffer analysis can be accessed in our GitHub project repository: https://github.com/eugeneyau/Tropical-Asian-Butterfly-Distribution under the Code directory. All data, including our butterfly occurrence dataset, SDM-predicted distribution maps, tropical Asian biogeographic regions shapefile, and buffered occurrence points for species excluded from our species distribution modeling are available from our FigShare repository (https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.25037645). Some data for Sulawesi, provided by TK, have not been included in the data release but are available upon request to TK. Language: English