Data for: Combining environmental niche models, multi-grain analyses, and species traits identifies pervasive effects of land use on butterfly biodiversity across Italy

Understanding how species respond to human activities is paramount to ecology and conservation science, one outstanding question being how large-scale patterns in land use affect biodiversity. To facilitate answering this question, we propose a novel analytical framework that combines Environmental Niche Models, multi-grain analyses, and species traits. We illustrate the framework capitalizing on the most extensive dataset compiled to date for the butterflies of Italy (106,514 observations for 288 species), assessing how agriculture and urbanization have affected biodiversity of these taxa from landscape to regional scales (3–48 km grains) across the country while accounting for its steep climatic gradients.
Multiple lines of evidence suggest pervasive and scale-dependent effects of land use on butterflies in Italy. While land use explained patterns in species richness primarily at grains ≤ 12 km, idiosyncratic responses in species highlighted “winners” and “losers” across human-dominat..., The data preparation is described in detail in Riva et al. (2023) \"Combining environmental niche models, multi-grain analyses, and species traits identifies pervasive effects of land use on butterfly biodiversity across Italy\", in the journal Global Change Biology (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/gcb.16615). , Analyses presented in the manuscript can be replicated using software R. For estimating variable importance for Maxent models, the Java version of Maxent must also be installed on the machine.Â