Despite being one of the most diverse taxonomic groups on the planet, global information on insect spatial distributions is severely lacking, even among the relatively charismatic insect taxa. Sandall et al. (2022) and Pinkert et al. (2022) have contributed to closing these knowledge gaps for the world's odonates and butterflies, respectively, with their global country checklist databases.
Sandall et al. compiled checklist and occurrence data from searching the literature and biodiversity data aggregators, including GBIF and the Odonate Database of Africa, and contacting known odonate experts. The data was taxonomically harmonized using the May 2021 version of the World Odonata List (Paulson et al., 2021; Paulson & Schorr, 2021). To account for missing species in the datasets, the researchers performed an interpolation for each country to generate additional lists of species with a high likelihood of occurring in each country that were not recorded in the dataset. In total, they identified 25,270 unique species-country combinations from the compiled datasets representing 6,076 odonate species. Additionally, they identified 6,299 likely species-country combinations resulting from the interpolation analysis.
Pinkert et al. compiled checklist data from 165 field guides, atlases, and web sources and over 26 million occurrence records from GBIF. Species names were taxonomically harmonized against the most recent version of the global species checklist of butterfly names (Lamas, 2015). Several manual and analytical quality control measures were taken to ensure data accuracy. In total, the researchers identified 87,506 unique species-country combinations representing 19,191 total butterfly species.
See below for full citations to the two papers.
Sandall E.L., Pinkert S., Jetz W. 2022. Country-level checklists and occurrences for the world's Odonata (dragonflies and damselflies). Journal of Biogeography, https://doi.org/10.1111/jbi.14457.
Pinkert S., Barve V., Guralick R., Jetz W. 2022. Global geographical and latitudinal variation in butterfly species richness captured through a comprehensive country-level occurrence database. Global Ecology and Biogeography, https://doi.org/10.1111/geb.13475.
