Local entomologists shine a light on moth communities: The value of amateur records in cataloguing long-term change

The University Museum of Zoology (Cambridge) (UMZC) recently received a
collection of macro-moths from the late Gerald Maurice Haggett (1927-2019)
(generously donated by his family), which included an estimated 40,000
macro-moth specimens, and 17 books containing written records of moths and
other Lepidoptera and wildlife observations. The majority of these records
were his own, but the collection also included several written works from
other people (listed below). The Museum similarly received a separate
donation of written records from the late Colin Smith (1927-1997). The
data presented here are transcriptions of written records kept by several
amateur collectors in the UK across the last 82 years: Gerald
Maurice Haggett, Reverend Cyril Alfred Drummond Ash (1856-1949), and Colin
Smith. Records were extracted, species names updated using the NHM Species
Dictionary, and separated by life stage, sampling method, location, and
observer. Please note to protect the locations of some species, all
species locations have been reduced to the county level. Further, in line
with the wishes of the donors, all records of larvae that are not Least
Concern (species conservation status according to Fox, et al. 2019) have
been omitted. This will impact counts of records, but as larvae were not
used in any analyses, this will not have impacted any of the results
presented in the manuscript outside of those total counts. In order to
understand how the newly acquired collection of specimens fit into the
existing collection at the museum, we undertook a project to count and
compare this new collection of macro-moths with the existing collection at
UMZC. There is a separate dataset for that collection of biological
specimens, including counts per life stage and in which collection.
Written records are often discarded instead of deposited alongside
biological collections in museums. Though the use of biological
collections to study long-term change has increased over the years, the
use of the associated written records has been less noticeable. As such,
we demonstrate several uses of written records, including testing for
changes in phenology, and species richness and abundance. The data
presented here is largely in two forms. Firstly, a count of species by
life stage of biological specimens present in the new collection and in
the existing UMZC collection, for comparison purposes. Secondly, the
digitised written records. The use of each dataset in the paper are
explained in the accompanying code (analysed in R). There is a separate
dataset for an associated collection of biological specimens, there were
also collected by several people, with the largest contributions from
Gerald Maurice Haggett, and Harold Edward (Ted) Hammond (1902-1963). For
the written records, the dataset has been reformatted to streamline the
code in several ways from the original structure, and so in some cases,
there are multiple versions of the dataset included here. Their use and
reformatting is explained in the code.