Geographical patterns of Triatominae (Heteroptera: Reduviidae): their distribution, richness and morphology in the Neotropics

Presence/absence of 115 species of Triatominae (Reduviidae, Heteroptera) in the Neotropical Region, in a grid of 2736 cells, at a resolution of 1x1 degree (square cells of approximately 110 x 110 km). For every cell also about 140 climatic and vegetation parameters are given. The main bibliographic source for presence/absence was "Carcavallo, R. U., S. I. Curto de Casas, I. A. Sherlock, I. Galíndez Girón, J. Jurberg, C. Galvao and C. A. Mena Segura. 1999. Geographical distribution and alti-latitudinal dispersion of Triatominae. Pp. 747-792. Volume III. Chap. 17. In: R. U. Carcavallo, I. Galíndez Girón, J. Jurberg and H. Lent (Compiladores). Atlas of Chagas' Disease Vectors in the Americas. Editorial Fio Cruz Rio de Janeiro, Brasil. 4 Volúmenes. 1217 pp.", with some minor revisions and updates from more recent sources. For the climatic information the main source was the agroclimatic database of the Agromet Group of the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations by means of the software New_LocClim vers. 1.10 (Gommes, R., Grieser, J. & Bernardi, M. (2004) FAO agroclimatic databases and mapping tools. Newsletter of the European Society for Agronomy, 22, 32-36.), available at ftp://ext-ftp.fao.org/SD/Reserved/Agromet/New_LocClim/. The vegetation information was based on 22 vegetation types provided by Eva et al. (2004) for the Neotropics developed by the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission, Ispra, Italy (Eva, H.D., et al. (2004) A land cover map of South America. Global Change Biology, 10, 731–744.) A few of the 2736 cells (less than 1.4 %) lack some of the climatic variables (representing a loss of less than 0.1% of the data matrix). A second data set present for 71 species of Tratominae de measurements of 15 morphological variables.