Geography of life histories in a tropical fauna: The case of Indian butterflies

To explore factors structuring a tropical butterfly fauna, separate effects of geography, climate, land covers, and socio-economic conditions, and to relate patterns due to the above groups of predictors to life history traits of the constituent species. Location: Republic of India, Indo-Malayan Realm. Taxon: A total of 1386 butterfly species. Checklist butterfly data for 36 Indian federal states and union territories were subject to ordination analyses, relating the species composition of the states' and territories' faunas to physical geography, climate, land covers, and socioeconomic conditions of the states. The patterns obtained were interpreted in terms of life history traits of the butterflies using the fourth-corner method, both ignoring and considering the phylogenetic signal in the environment × life history relationships. Physical geography was the strongest predictor of the states' butterfly faunas’ compositions. It was followed by climate, land covers, and socioeconomics. T..., , , # Data used for the manuscript: Geography of life histories in a tropical fauna: The case of Indian butterflies

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.mpg4f4r9r](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.mpg4f4r9r)

## Description of the data and file structure

**Filename:** 0_State_wise_butterfly_checklist.xlsx

**Description:** The matrix of all Indian butterfly species and their presence in 36 federal states and union territories is based on Das et al. (2023), updated with more recent records, obtaining a total of 1386 species by April 2024.

**Filename:** 0_Environmental_data_for_states.xlsx

**Description:** Predictors describing individual states contains the cardinal coordinates of the states’ centroids, area, their average altitude, and the difference between highest and lowest altitude viewed as a measure of topographic and habitat heterogeneity. For climate, four compound variables were produced from 19 bioclim variables using principal component analysis (WorldClim 2024). For land use and land...,