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-dominated regions. Detrimental effects of agriculture and
urbanization emerged from landscape (3-km grain) to regional (48-km grain)
scales, disproportionally affecting small butterflies and butterflies with
a short flight curve. Human activities have therefore reorganized the
biogeography of Italian butterflies, filtering out species with poor
dispersal capacity and narrow niche breadth not only from local
assemblages but also from regional species pools. These results suggest
that global conservation efforts neglecting large-scale patterns in land
use risk falling short of their goals, even for taxa typically assumed to
persist in small natural areas (e.g., invertebrates). Our study also
confirms that consideration of spatial scales will be crucial to
implementing effective conservation actions in the Post-2020 Global
Biodiversity Framework. In this context, applications of the proposed
analytical framework have broad potential to identify which mechanisms
underlie biodiversity change at different spatial scales. 
Funding statement: FR is supported by the PROBAE project “Protect
butterflies across Europe through climate refugia” funded by the European
Commission through Horizon 2020, Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA)
individual fellowship, reintegration panel (Grant agreement ID:
101024579). Open Access Funding provided by Universita degli Studi di
Torino within the CRUI-CARE Agreement.