Integrated range maps for North American butterflies derived from expert opinion and relative predicted habitat suitability

Integrated range maps were created by combining expert opinion, in the form of polygons from expert field guides (Glassberg 2017, 2018), with relative predicted habitat suitability from MaxEnt models using data from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) records. For species with limited point occurrence records, we used pseudo-presence points within the expert range. With these resulting integrated range maps, we calculated an estimated range for each species by clipping their range rasters to only cells with predicted suitability >0.20 and converting the remaining cells to a smoothed polygon. We then generated a 'butterfly environment index' which is the mean relative predicted habitat suitability for all species whose ranges encompass a site (i.e. it is the mean suitability of a site for species that may be expected to occur there). The integrated range maps were generated to support projects investigating macroscale patterns in butterfly biodiversity in North America, or for species-specific projects that require spatial information for focal species (e.g. where they are likely to occur, estimated extent of occurrence, etc.). The data could also be used for prioritizing regions that may be home to a high diversity of species, or are good habitat for the species that occur within a region. The integrated ranges should be treated as estimates of species distributions, rather than absolute cutoffs in range. The raster values should not be interpreted as probability of occurrence, but rather as relative predicted suitability which also incorporates distance from the expert range to reduce the influence of potentially spurious observations. File list README.xml - metadata for all species integrated range maps integrated-ranges.zip - a compressed folder containing all 750 integrated range maps, including those generated with pseudo-presence points, as rasters in .tiff format species_richness.tif - a raster of estimated species richness generated by overlaying polygons created at the 0.20 threshold as described in the associated manuscript continental-BEI.tiff - a raster of estimated relative predicted habitat suitability where values are inclusive of all 750 species (i.e. including species that are not expected to occur in a region) as described in the associated manuscript local-BEI.tiff - a raster of estimated relative predicted habitat suitability for species that are expected to occur locally (i.e. only including species that are expected to occur in a region) as described in the associated manuscript