Specialized flower visitation in montane butterflies is associated with positive population trajectories over time

Insect biodiversity is under threat from multiple stressors including climate change and extreme weather. For butterflies, nectar resource use is an understudied trait in relation to population trajectories and responses to global change. Here, we characterize nectar breadth for 50 species of montane butterflies occurring in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California and Nevada. These species displayed a wide spectrum of nectar use including relative specialists and extreme generalists. Further, we examined how nectar breadth and other species traits, including latent variables indicating ecological flexibility and dispersal potential, were indicative of long-term population trajectories, and responses to an extreme drought event from 2011-2015. Species that were more nectar-generalized were more likely to be declining, but nectar breadth did not predict how a species responded to extreme drought. Greater ecological flexibility as reflected in other traits was positively associated with ..., , , # Data from: Specialized flower visitation in montane butterflies is associated with positive population trajectories over time

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.tb2rbp0cg](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.tb2rbp0cg)

## Description of the data and file structure

The data used consists of data from photographic observations from the authors and iNaturalist data from GBIF, and nectar breadth values derived from those observations. Species-level trends are derived from long-term monitoring of Sierra butterflies started by Dr. Art Shapiro, and contributed to by the Forister lab. 

### Files and variables

#### File: all_data_copy.csv

**Description:** NA values in the data represent values of variables that were not available due to absent information, or insufficient information (i.e., rarefied nectar breadth was not calculated for species with fewer than 10 observations).

##### Variables

* Butterfly: Butterfly species name
* n: number observations, i.e. number of photographs containing spe...,