Country-level checklists and occurrences for the world’s Odonata (dragonflies and damselflies)

Biogeographic inference as well as assessments of species’ threat status and trends depend on comprehensive information on the current geographic distribution of species. At the global scale, such information remains woefully inadequate for insects, despite broad concerns about their decline. Even country-level presences remain poorly known for many species and consistent global overviews for insect taxa are missing. Here we integrate information from literature checklists, point occurrences, and identify potential species range gaps to provide a database of country-level checklists of dragonfly and damselfly species. While limited in spatial detail, country-level characterizations of species distributions are a useful baseline and starting point for global biogeographic assessment and for assessing remaining gaps in taxonomic and spatial knowledge.