A georeferenced checklist of the butterflies of Bhutan

The development of georeferenced, freely accessible biodiversity datasets is becoming an inescapable necessity to speed our ability to understand, analyse and manage the dramatic changes going on ecosystems due to both global climate change and the human impact on the biosphere. Mega projects attempting to manage big biodiversity data, such as GEOSS, GBIF, OBIS, etc. represent significant ongoing answers to this necessity. However, they are still largely incomplete and, unfortunately, basically heterogeneous in their geo-location accuracy. Therefore, regional spatially and temporally explicit datasets, are needed to study species-habitat relationships, investigate the possible occurrence of shifts in specie ranges, altitudinal distribution and phenology, and to develop spatially explicit species distribution models (SDMs). Butterflies are rigorously dependent upon both biotic and abiotic landscape features even at very tiny scales, since their ecology and evolution have been shaped upon their “coarse-grained” sensitivity to the environmental heterogeneity. Butterflies have short life cycles and thus react quickly to environmental changes. Their limited dispersal ability, larval foodplant specialisation and close-reliance on the weather and climate make many butterfly species sensitive to fine-scale changes. These features make butterflies a valuable indicator of biodiversity and provide an early warning system for biodiversity loss and other kinds of ecosystem changes. As a result, they are now the best-monitored group of insects in the world. In this framework, butterflies inhabiting Himalayan countries represent a remarkably interesting model to investigate the possible occurrence of shifts in specie ranges, altitudinal distribution and phenology. We present the first attempt to build up a georeferenced dataset of the butterflies of Bhutan. Butterfly fauna of Bhutan probably amounts to around 800 species. The huge range of habitats in Bhutan, from subtropical in the south to alpine in the north, presents a wide assemblage of habitat niches for butterflies. Similarly to Nepal, Sikkim and other Himalayan countries, both Palaearctic and Indo-Malayan species occur in Bhutan, however, the most interesting zoogeographical feature is represented by a very large array of Sino-Himalayan taxa. So far we have digitalised data collected by three of us (GCB. KW and VS) during recent trips from 2008 to 2013, as well as data obtained from a few recently published papers, where recording localities were presented with an acceptable degree of accuracy. At this time the dataset includes more than 450 species and around 1800 records, with a fairy good geographical coverage of the country, from tropical Dooars up to the alpine zone at 5000 m.