Occurrence Records of Tropical Asian Butterflies: 1970 - 2024

Occurrence records of tropical Asia's butterflies collated from online databases and published literature. This dataset consists of 730,190 occurrence records for 3,752 species.Methods:We collected occurrence records for tropical Asian Papilionoidea (Lepidoptera: Nymphalidae, Papilionidae, Lycaenidae, Pieridae, Hesperiidae, Riodinidae)(-11.426 – 35.64 N, 67.588 – 174.990 E) for the years 1970-present. Records were extracted from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility on 15 April 2024. We included only presence records derived from human observation, preserved specimens, material samples, or literature, provided they had associated coordinates. We omitted all records with >100,000 m coordinate uncertainty, so-called “fuzzy” taxon matches, and records for which the scientific name was missing or incomplete, unless nomenclature could be extracted using a BOLD identifier (boldsystems.org/). This resulted in a final number of GBIF records = 651,285. Note to commercial users: 432,340 GBIF records included within this dataset have a CC BY-NC 4.0 license. See column Z for data license types and/or visit the GBIF-derived dataset (https://doi.org/10.15468/dl.9wyfb6) to rerun the query and filter data according to their licenses.We also extracted data from the B2D2 Database of Butterflies for Borneo provided by JKH/the Darwin Initiative (n = 19,417) and a dataset for Bangladesh provided by SC (Chowdhury et al. 2021) (n = 18,278), and unpublished datasets from coauthors AN, DJL, LVV, TK, and YB (n = 13,993). To fill geographic gaps when all of these records were plotted, we conducted targeted searches of the published literature on Google Scholar (details below), resulting in an additional 27,217 records. Pre-1970 data were omitted where possible from all sources. Final binomial synonym harmonization, validation, and authority assignment were conducted by DJL using a taxonomic reference prepared by Gerardo Lamas (Lamas, 2015. Catalogue of the butterflies (Papilionidae). Available from the author.).For geographic regions with relatively few GBIF records (e.g., China, Myanmar, Thailand) and for species with < 10 records, we conducted targeted literature searches using Google Scholar in English, simplified Chinese, and traditional Chinese (genus OR genus + species + country name). For all species records in published sources, we extracted coordinates, locality name, locality type (e.g., exact coordinates, city, national park, island, or province), country, and year of record (where available). If exact coordinates were not provided by the source, we used Google Earth Pro (v7.3.6.9345) to estimate the locality centroid for any record provided at the province level or below (e.g., national park or city). For records from islands ≤ 100 km in length or diameter (e.g, localities within the Philippines and Indonesia), we estimated the island or archipelago centroid. If a range of coordinates was provided (e.g., records from The Butterflies of Vietnam), coordinates within the range were chosen haphazardly by selecting a point within the range provided on Google Earth Pro. Data sources for all records are provided in the reference column (C) in Occurrence Records of Tropical Asian Butterflies: 1970-2024 and alphabetically in Data Sources for: Occurrence Records of Tropical Asian Butterflies: 1970-2024.