Geographic distribution change and climatic niche change of Odonates in Great Britain

Species are largely thought to maintain broadly static niches over time, an assumption underpinning much theoretical ecology including the implementation of ecological models to project species’ current and future distributions. Here, we assess niche conservatism in odonates in Great Britain over the past six decades by simultaneously quantifying changes in species geographic distribution and evaluating temporal trends in species realised climatic niche., These results are based on an analysis of species occurrence records for Odonates in Great Britain that were downloaded from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility and the National Biodiversity Network Atlas for the period 1961 and 2020. Odonates occupancy trends throughout this period were extracted using the Frescalo method (see Hill’s 2002 paper ‘Local frequency as a key to interpreting species occurrence data when recording effort is not known’).
Occurrences were subsequently divided into two time periods, T1 (1961-1980) and T2 (2001-2020) and species geographic distribution change as well as species climatic niche change compared between these two periods. Species geographic shift was analysed in terms of the change in the geographic centre of species’ distribution between periods – the distance and direction between species centre at T1 and T2 are provided.
Species climatic niche change was based on 19 bioclimate variables and 6 climate extreme indices, following a Principle..., , # Geographic distribution change and climatic niche change of Odonates in Great Britain

## Excel File: OdonataDataset

This data gives the results of an analysis of Odonata distribution change in Great Britain during the last 6 decades of recent climate change. Species geographic distribution change and trend in occupancy is given, as well as an analysis of species climatic niche change.

The data is structured in an excel file, with the following columns:

**Species** - species scientific name
**Suborder** - Anisoptera (Dragonfly) or Zygoptera (Damselfly)
**Family** - species family
**Annual Centroid Shift: Distance (km)** - the change in the geographic centre of species distribution between two time periods (T1: 1961-1980 and T2: 2001-2020) given as an annual distance of shift in km (i.e. total distance from distribution centre at T1 and T2 divided by total 40 years)
**Centroid Shift: Direction** - the geographic direction of change between species centre of distribution at T1 and ...