Long-term trends in abundance and compositional variability of butterflies in Central Europe

The data contains compilations of long-term museum records (1940-2017) of butterflies (Rhopalocera and Hesperiidae, families Hesperiidae, Lycaenidae, Nymphalidae, Papilionidae, Pieridae, Riodinidae) and burnet moths (Zygaenidae) from Baden-Württemberg, south-western Germany (below SW-Germany; published in Habel et al., 2019) and Salzburg, central Austria (C-Austria; Habel et al., 2022). The geographical distance between these regions ranges between 350–400 km. Both study regions are comprised of diverse habitats and have undergone severe changes in land use since the 1960s. These include increasing urbanisation and agricultural intensification, the latter accompanied by high nitrogen intake, reduced ground water levels, and pesticide applications. The C-Austrian sites suffer additionally from skiing and tracking tourism, as well as land abandonment at medium to higher elevation. The data stem from historical field books, protocols, yearly reports, index cards, literature, diaries and butterfly collections. They encompass records of complete annual butterfly communities and are stored on the InsectIS and Schmetterlingsfauna Baden-Württembergs online websites (www.insectis.de, www.schmetterlinge-bw.de) for SW-Germany. The C-Austrian data are stored in the Haus der Natur museum collection (Habel et al., 2019, 2022). In total, the SW-German data consisted of 220,758 records from 155 species, and the C- Austrian data of 55,641 records from 170 species.