Phenotypic plasticity in tropical butterflies is linked to climatic seasonality on a macroevolutionary scale

Phenotypic plasticity can be adaptive in fluctuating environments by providing rapid environment-phenotype matching and this applies particularly in seasonal environments. African Bicyclus butterflies have repeatedly colonized seasonal savannahs from ancestral forests around the Late Miocene and many species now exhibit seasonal polyphenism. On a macroevolutionary scale, it can be expected that savannah species will exhibit higher plasticity due to them experiencing stronger environmental seasonality than forest species. We quantified seasonality using environmental niche modelling, and surveyed the degree of plasticity in a key wing pattern element (eyespot size) using museum specimens. We show that species occurring in highly seasonal environments display strong plasticity, while species in less seasonal or aseasonal environments exhibit surprisingly variable degrees of plasticity, including strong to no plasticity. Furthermore, eyespot size plasticity has a moderate phylogenetic sign..., The dataset has two components: (1) phenotypic data- the data was collected by measuring the eyespot size and wing length (which was then used to calculate relative eyespot size) from the photographed museum specimens of African Bicyclus butterflies. (2) distribution data- this is the distribution/location data for the African Bicyclus butterflies collated from museum records and citizen science online platforms. All the data (in .csv and .xlsx) has been processed in R statistical software, except the environmental niche modelling which was carried out using the Maxent software., , **README: Phenotypic plasticity in tropical butterflies is linked to climatic seasonality on a macroevolutionary scale**

This repository contains all the data and R scripts used to perform the analyses. The files are grouped (as two folders) according to the type of data and analyses. Details are as follows: 

***Environmental_niche_modelling folder***

**Species location data**

Bicyclus_all_non_duplicated_presence_points.csv - raw data containing lat-long records for Bicyclus species. This data is the finalised version after doing all the checks for duplicate coordinates and other obvious errors (see Methods for details). 

Bicyclus_rarefied_for_maxent_input.csv - raw data containing lat-long records for Bicyclus species after performing thinning (see ‘plotting_location_points_and_rarefaction.Rmd’ script). The rarefaction level used for each species is provided in Table S1. 

Koppen_clipping_mask.asc - Koppen climate mask used for clipping Bioclim rasters, for example, to remove dese...