Environmental controls on butterfly occurrence and species richness in Israel: The importance of temperature over rainfall

Aim Butterflies are considered important indicators representing the state of biodiversity and key ecosystem functions, but their use as bioindicators requires better understanding of how their observed response link to environmental factors. Moreover, better understanding how butterfly faunas vary with climate and land cover may be useful to estimate the potential impacts of various drivers, including climate change, botanical succession, grazing, and afforestation. It is particularly important to establish which species of butterflies are sensitive to each environmental driver. Location Israel, including the West Bank and Golan Heights. Methods To develop a robust and systematic approach for identifying how butterfly faunas vary with the environment, we analysed the occurrence of 73 species and the abundance of 24 species from Israeli Butterfly Monitoring Scheme (BMS-IL) data. We used Regional Generalised Additive Models to quantify butterfly abundance, and generalised linear latent v...