Regional differences in thermoregulation between two European butterfly communities

Understanding how different organisms cope with changing temperatures is vital for predicting future species’ distributions and highlighting those at risk from climate change. As ectotherms, butterflies are sensitive to temperature changes, but the factors affecting butterfly thermoregulation are not fully understood.
We investigated which factors influence thermoregulatory ability in a subset of a Mediterranean butterfly community. We measured adult thoracic temperature and environmental temperature (787 butterflies; 23 species) and compared buffering ability (defined as the ability to maintain a consistent body temperature across a range of air temperatures) and buffering mechanisms to previously published results from Great Britain. Finally, we tested whether thermoregulatory ability could explain species’ demographic trends in Catalonia.
The sampled sites in each region differ climatically, with higher temperatures and solar radiation but lower wind speeds in the Catalan sites. Both..., , , # Regional differences in thermoregulation between two European butterfly communities

This dataset contains the data and scripts required to reproduce the analyses in Toro-Delgado et al. (J. Anim. Ecol.). It contains the temperature measurements from Catalonia, the R scripts to conduct the statistical analyses, and Python scripts to download the solar radiation data from the Copernicus Atmospheric Monitoring Service (CAMS). The temperature data from Great Britain was released in Bladon et al. (2020).

## Description of the data and file structure

The \"Data\" folder contains the file \"Butterfly_Thermoregulation_Data.txt\", a tab-separated file containing the data gathered from the field in Catalonia. The column meanings are as follows:

* Order: a numbered column, to be able to recover the original order of the rows.
* Time: Hour of the measurement (in CEST, 24-hour format).
* Species: the species of butterfly being measured (scientific name).
* Code: field code used to identif...