Photographic records of butterflies sampled for paper: Salazar-Carrión, P., Medina, A., Morochz C., Hall, Jason P. W. & Willmott, K. R. (in review). Choice of carrion bait for monitoring tropical butterflies: a case study in western Ecuador

This dataset contains a ZIP archive of 1,482 high-resolution photographic records of butterflies (Lepidoptera: Papilionoidea) sampled during a bait-trapping experiment conducted between January and September 2017 in the Mashpi-Tayra Biodiversity Reserve, Ecuador, plus a metadata CSV describing each record. The metadata file (MashpiBaitExperiment_RawData.csv) includes: INDIVIDUAL_ID: unique code for each butterfly. RELEASE_COLLECT: capture outcome (collected or marked/released). SAMPLING_EVENT: sampling event code (SE1–SE14). DATE and TIME of capture. TRAP_STATION: trap station number. STRATA: canopy or understorey. BAIT: bait type used. RECAPTURES: capture status (e.g., first capture, recapture). FAMILY and SPECIES identification. PHOTO_ID: original photo filename (can be linked to the corresponding image file in the accompanying ZIP archive) ABUNDANCE_INCL: whether the record was included in abundance analyses or not (see Materials and Methods of associated publication for details). ID_STATUS: species taxonomic identification status (e.g., verified, unresolved, provisional). NOTES: additional remarks (in Spanish and English). The images serve as voucher records for the butterflies sampled in this study and may be valuable for future species verification or taxonomic revision of this dataset. This dataset accompanies the manuscript:“Choice of carrion bait for monitoring tropical butterflies: a case study in western Ecuador”, submitted to Journal of Tropical Ecology.