Aggregate biodiversity data from museum specimens and community observations have promise for macroscale ecological analyses. Despite this, many groups are undersampled, and sampling is not homogeneous across space. Here we used butterflies, the best documented group of insects, to examine inventory completeness across North America. We separated digitally accessible butterfly records into those from natural history collections and burgeoning community science observations to determine if these data sources have differential spatio-taxonomic biases. When we combined all data, we found startling under-sampling in regions with the most dramatic trajectories of climate change and across biomes. We also used multiple methods with each supporting the hypothesis that community science observations are filling more gaps in sampling but are more biased towards areas with the highest human footprint. Finally, we found that both types of occurrences have familial-level taxonomic completeness biases, in contrast to the hypothesis of less taxonomic bias in natural history collections data. These results suggest that higher inventory completeness, driven by rapid growth of community science observations, is partially offset by higher spatio-taxonomic biases. We use the findings here to provide recommendations on how to alleviate some of these gaps in the context of prioritizing global change research.

Butterflies are a diverse and charismatic insect group that are thought to have evolved with plants and dispersed throughout the world in response to key geological events. However, these hypotheses have not been extensively tested because a comprehensive phylogenetic framework and datasets for butterfly larval hosts and global distributions are lacking. We sequenced 391 genes from nearly 2,300 butterfly species, sampled from 90 countries and 28 specimen collections, to reconstruct a new phylogenomic tree of butterflies representing 92% of all genera. Our phylogeny has strong support for nearly all nodes and demonstrates that at least 36 butterfly tribes require reclassification. Divergence time analyses imply an origin ~100 million years ago for butterflies and indicate that all but one family were present before the K/Pg extinction event. We aggregated larval host datasets and global distribution records and found that butterflies are likely to have first fed on Fabaceae and originated in what is now the Americas. Soon after the Cretaceous Thermal Maximum, butterflies crossed Beringia and diversified in the Palaeotropics. Our results also reveal that most butterfly species are specialists that feed on only one larval host plant family. However, generalist butterflies that consume two or more plant families usually feed on closely related plants.

1. The widespread use of species traits to infer community assembly mechanisms or to link species to ecosystem functions has led to an exponential increase in functional diversity analyses, with >10,000 papers published in 2010-2019, and >1,500 papers only in 2020. This interest is reflected in the development of a multitude of theoretical and methodological frameworks for calculating functional diversity, making it challenging to navigate the myriads of options and to report details to reproduce a traitbased analysis. Therefore, the study of functional diversity would benefit from the existence of a general guideline for standard reporting and good practices in this discipline.2. We devise an eight-step protocol to guide ecologists in conducting and reporting functional diversity analyses. We do so by streamlining available terminology, concepts, and methods, with the overarching goal of increasing reproducibility, transparency and comparability across studies. The protocol is based on the following key elements: identification of a research question, a sampling scheme and a study design, assemblage of community and trait data matrices, data exploration and preprocessing, functional diversity computation, model fitting, evaluation and interpretation, and data, metadata and code provision.3. Throughout the protocol, we provide information on how to best select research questions and study designs, and discuss ways to ensure reproducibility in reporting results. To facilitate the implementation of this protocol, we further developed an interactive web-based application (stepFD) in the form of a checklist workflow, detailing all the steps of the protocol and providing tabular and graphical outputs that can be merged to produce a final report.

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Natural history collections (NHCs) have been indispensable to understanding longer‐term trends of the timing of seasonal events. Massive‐scale digitization of specimens promises to further enable phenological research, especially the ability to move towards a deeper understanding of drivers of change and how trait–environment interactions shape phenological sensitivity. Despite the promise of NHCs to answer fundamental phenology questions, the use of these data resources presents unique and often overlooked challenges requiring specialized workflow steps, such as assembling multisource data, accounting for date imprecision and making decisions about trade‐offs between data density and spatial resolution. We provide a set of key best practice recommendations and showcase these via a case study that utilizes NHC data to test hypotheses about spatiotemporal trends in adult Lepidoptera (i.e. butterflies and moths) flight timing across North America. Our case study is a worked example of these best practices, helping practitioners recognize and overcome potential pitfalls at each step, from data acquisition and cleaning, to delineating spatial units and proper estimation of phenological metrics and associated uncertainty, to building appropriate models. We confirm and extend the critical importance of voltinism and diapause strategy, but less‐so daily activity patterns, for predicting Lepidoptera phenology spatiotemporal trends. Our case study also showcases the unique power of NHC data to test existing hypotheses and generate new insights about temporal phenological trends. Specifically, migratory species and species that enter diapause as adults are advancing the start of flight periods in more recent years, even after accounting for climate context. These results highlight the physiological and adaptive differences between species with different overwintering strategies. We close by noting the value of partnerships between data scientists, museum experts and ecological modellers to fully harness the power of digital data resources to address pressing global change challenges. These partnerships can extend approaches for integrating multiple data types to fully unlock our understanding of the tempo, mode, drivers and outcomes of phenological changes at greater spatial, temporal and taxonomic scales. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.

Historical museum records provide potentially useful data for identifying drivers of change in species occupancy. However, because museum records are typically obtained via many collection methods, methodological developments are needed to enable robust inferences. Occupancy–detection models, a relatively new and powerful suite of statistical methods, are a potentially promising avenue because they can account for changes in collection effort through space and time. We use simulated datasets to identify how and when patterns in data and/or modelling decisions can bias inference. We focus primarily on the consequences of contrasting methodological approaches for dealing with species' ranges and inferring species' non‐detections in both space and time. We find that not all datasets are suitable for occupancy–detection analysis but, under the right conditions (namely, datasets that are broken into more time periods for occupancy inference and that contain a high fraction of community‐wide collections, or collection events that focus on communities of organisms), models can accurately estimate trends. Finally, we present a case study on eastern North American odonates where we calculate long‐term trends of occupancy using our most robust workflow. These results indicate that occupancy–detection models are a suitable framework for some research cases and expand the suite of available tools for macroecological analysis available to researchers, especially where structured datasets are unavailable.

Here, we present the largest, global dataset of Lepidopteran traits, focusing initially on butterflies (ca. 12,500 species records). These traits are derived from field guides, taxonomic treatments, and other literature resources. We present traits on wing size, phenology,voltinism, diapause/overwintering stage, hostplant associations, and habitat affinities (canopy, edge, moisture, and disturbance). This dataset will facilitate comparative research on butterfly ecology and evolution and our goal is to inspire future research collaboration and the continued development of this dataset.

Butterflies are a diverse and charismatic insect group that are thought to have diversified via coevolution with plants and in response to dispersals following key geological events. These hypotheses have been poorly tested at the macroevolutionary scale because a comprehensive phylogenetic framework and datasets on global distributions and larval hosts of butterflies are lacking. We sequenced 391 genes from nearly 2,000 butterfly species to construct a new, phylogenomic tree of butterflies representing 92% of all genera and aggregated global distribution records and larval host datasets. We found that butterflies likely originated in what is now the Americas, ~100 Ma, shortly before the Cretaceous Thermal Maximum, then crossed Beringia and diversified in the Paleotropics. The ancestor of modern butterflies likely fed on Fabaceae, and most extant families were present before the K/Pg extinction. The majority of butterfly dispersals occurred from the tropics (especially the Neotropics) to temperate zones, largely supporting a "cradle" pattern of diversification. Surprisingly, host breadth changes and shifts to novel host plants had only modest impacts.