Species interactions and predictions of co-occurrence methods for plant and butterfly species in 2008, used in "Co-occurrence patterns do not predict mutualistic interactions between plant and butterfly species"

Biotic interactions are crucial for determining the structure and dynamics of communities, but direct measurement of these interactions can be time- and resource-intensive, especially when numerous species are involved. Inferring species interactions from species co-occurrence patterns is increasingly being used; however, recent studies have highlighted some limitations. This is an assembled dataset that contains species-level interaction data for pairs of vascular plants and day-active (adult) Lepidoptera species and the prediction results of three different co-occurrence methods. Additionally, flower availability and flower visitation data was included. It considers, 51 and 21 lepidopteran and 135 and 51 plant species, for the regions Schwäbische Alb (ALB) and Schorfheide-Chorin (SCH) respectively, that simultaneously occurred in the field observations (abundance data) and showed species interaction in the literature. Co-occurrences were calculated by including 89 sites (EPs) in total, 46 in ALB and 43 in SCH, for which we found overlapping field and literature data. We also include other measures like the number of sites that a plant or butterfly species occurred at. The data collection/analysis was part of the project TrophCost within the framework of the DFG-funded joint project Biodiversity Exploratories (https://www.biodiversity-exploratories.de).