Country‐level checklists and occurrences for the world's Odonata (dragonflies and damselflies)

Abstract

Aim: Biogeographical inference and assessments of species' threat status and trends depend on comprehensive information on the current geographical distribution of species. Even country-level presences remain poorly known for many insect species and consistent global overviews for those species are missing. Here we integrate information from literature checklists, point occurrences, and identify potential species range gaps to provide a database of country-level checklists of dragonfly and damselfly species and a useful baseline for global biogeographical assessment and for assessing remaining gaps in taxonomic and spatial knowledge.Location: Global. Taxon: Odonata (damselflies and dragonflies).Methods: Our database of checklist information contains country-level species distribution information from 491 literature sources, with a focus on checklist data from 1990 to 2021 to reflect the present taxonomic and country boundaries. Additionally, we apply a novel method to interpolate potential species-country combinations missing from the literature and point data by generating a list of species present in >50% of the surrounding countries.Results: Of the 6,322 globally recognized odonate species, taxonomically harmonized literature checklist records and quality-controlled point occurrence data address 6,076 and 4,170 species, respectively. Our compilation provides a total of 31,569 unique species-country combinations, with 23,239 uniquely provided by literature checklist and 2,031 point occurrence data, respectively.Main Conclusions: This odonate country checklist dataset provides a resource for scientists and conservation practitioners to examine questions related to baseline odonate species richness, distributions, regional conservation, and gaps in taxonomic and spatial data coverage. The combined literature and point occurrence country-level information provide the most comprehensive data available to date on the global distribution of Odonata. Our results show that checklist and point occurrences are concordant in well-studied regions and that literature data are of complementary value in tropical and species-rich countries.

Beyond latitude: Temperature, productivity and thermal niche conservatism drive global body size variation in Odonata

“…In addition to its importance in shaping their contemporary distribution, phylogenetically comparative analyses and distributional anomalies also indicate that niche conservatism has greatly influenced the distribution and diversification of odonates. Although Odonata are globally distributed, the greatest number of families and genera are found in tropical climates, where the group originated (Bybee et al, 2021; Sandall et al, 2022). We found that the relatively few lineages in extreme climates (both desert and arctic regions) are almost exclusively anisopteran (Figure 3).…”

“…Finally, we pooled the gridded expert and ecoregional species ranges and removed duplicate cell–species combinations and cells with >50% water (i.e., with >50% of the values being not available in the mean annual temperature layer). The final distribution dataset included 5233 (83%) of all 6322 currently accepted Odonata species (Sandall et al, 2022), covering 2802 species with associated body size data.…”

“…Using the country-level checklist of Sandall et al (2022), records >1000 km away from a country of known occurrence were removed from the dataset, except when the number of outlier records per country for a species was equal to or greater than the number of countries from these records. For more details on the cleaning methods, see Pinkert, Barve, et al (2022), and for details on how many species and records were removed during the cleaning process, see Sandall et al (2022). Subsequently, occurrence records intersecting with expert maps were removed.…”

A Globally Integrated Structure of Taxonomy supporting biodiversity science and conservation

“…Inconsistency and lack of author information for birds, daisies, and amphibians (as indicated by their GIST score) limit the ability to track name identifications over time in taxonomic knowledge assessments. The number of sources required to generate a comprehensive synonym lists for butterflies and dragonflies diminish the GIST group score but does not necessarily impede subsequent integration thanks to recent efforts [32,75] (Box 1, Figure II). Exceptions that have a relatively high GIST score but are poorly integrated are crabs, while odonates, a small taxon with a relatively large research community but a lower GIST score, are exceptionally well-integrated.…”

“…Tracking the "Species concept in space and time" GIST element represents a specific area of needed and emerging focus (Box 1, Figure I) [80,81]. Documentation of alternative names from various sources in the "Synonyms list" also represents an area of improvement to ensure globally coordinated databases within and across taxa, as recently done for butterflies and dragonflies [32,75]. Even though databases may respond to distinct codes of nomenclature [82][83][84], or models of governance [37,47], the GIST elements are simple enough to be transferrable across all databases and taxa and can rely on the DwC standards (see Online Supplemental Information Table S2) [57].…”