The data in this checklist resource has been published as a Darwin Core Archive (DwC-A), which is a standardized format for sharing biodiversity data as a set of one or more data tables. The core data table contains 397 records.

1 extension data tables also exist. An extension record supplies extra information about a core record. The number of records in each extension data table is illustrated below.

This IPT archives the data and thus serves as the data repository. The data and resource metadata are available for download in the downloads section. The versions table lists other versions of the resource that have been made publicly available and allows tracking changes made to the resource over time.

Download the latest version of this resource data as a Darwin Core Archive (DwC-A) or the resource metadata as EML or RTF:

The table below shows only published versions of the resource that are publicly accessible.

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research - UFZ (2013). CLIMBER: Climatic niche characteristics of the butterflies in Europe. 397 records, Online at http://ipt.pensoft.net/ipt/resource.do?r=climber, version 1.3 (released on 3/12/2013), Resource ID: GBIF key: http://www.gbif.org/dataset/e2bcea8c-dfea-475e-a4ae-af282b4ea1c5, Data Paper ID: doi: 10.3897/zookeys.367.6185

Researchers should respect the following rights statement:

The publisher and rights holder of this work is ZooKeys. This database - CLIMBER is made available under the Open Database License: http://opendatacommons.org/licenses/odbl/1.0/. Any rights in individual contents of the database are licensed under the Database Contents License: http://opendatacommons.org/licenses/dbcl/1.0/

This resource has been registered with GBIF, and assigned the following GBIF UUID: e2bcea8c-dfea-475e-a4ae-af282b4ea1c5.  ZooKeys publishes this resource, and is itself registered in GBIF as a data publisher endorsed by Participant Node Managers Committee.

climate change; climate warming; CTI; global change; global warming; modelling; risk; trend; STI; Europe; butterflies; Papilionidae; Pieridae; Lycaenidae; Riodinidae; Hesperiidae; Checklist

Europe, excluding Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova, Russia, Cyprus, Iceland, and the Atlantic islands (Azores, Madeira and Canary Islands). No climatic data were available from some small islands such as the Pontine Islands (Italy) and Nissiros (Greece).

European butterfly species

A. Butterfly distribution data Climatic niche characteristics of the butterflies in Europe are based on their European distribution. Butterfly distributions were available from about 7000 georeferenced localities and about 200,000 database records. These records were stored in a data base and constituted also the basis for ‘The Distribution Atlas of European Butterflies’ (Kudrna 2002) and, as an updated version, for the ‘Distribution Atlas of Butterflies in Europe’ (Kudrna et al. 2011). To avoid problems of occasional undersampling and imprecise geo-reference of some locations at the local scale, we re-sampled the localities to 1720 CGRS grid cells (ca. 50 km × 50 km). B. Climate data We used monthly, interpolated climate data (public available at http://www.alarmproject.net/climate/climate), originally provided via the ALARM project (Settele et al. 2012; Settele et al. 2005; Spangenberg et al. 2012) at a 10 arcmin grid resolution (Mitchell et al. 2004; New et al. 2000) and aggregated them to the CGRS grid (Fig. 5). For a detailed description of the climate data see Fronzek et al. (2012). The following basic climatic variables were used to assess aspects of the climatic niche: mean annual temperature (°C), range of annual temperature (°C), annual precipitation sum (mm), range of annual precipitation (mm), accumulated growing degree days with a base temperature of 5°C until February, April, June and August and soil water content for the upper horizon (0.5 m). Different time periods for calculating accumulated growing degree days enable the consideration of different phenologies and phenological aspects in the analysis of the climatic species characteristics. We do not provide growing degree days for periods ending later than August because these values are highly correlated with mean annual temperature in any case. Soil water content originated from the dynamic vegetation model LPJ-GUESS (Hickler et al. 2009; Hickler et al. 2004) which provides a process-based representation of the water balance in terrestrial ecosystems. According to the time period of the butterfly distribution data, we used averaged values for the period 1971-2000 for the climate data. C. Calculation of the climatic niche characteristics Climatic niche characteristics were calculated per butterfly species according to the climatic conditions across their respective ranges, i.e. across all grid cells in which a particular species occurs (see Devictor et al. 2012a; Schweiger et al. 2012; Van Swaay et al. 2010; Van Swaay et al. 2008; Fig. 5). The dataset comprises information for the position and breadth of the climatic niche. Niche position is indicated by the median and mean value for each climate variable across a species’ range, accompanied by the 95% confidence interval for the mean. Niche breadth is indicated by the standard deviation and the minimum and maximum values for each climatic variable across a species’ range.

Method step description:

1. Butterfly distribution data are based on a data base which combines information from local recorders and private, regional and national data bases. Thereof, species distributional maps have been developed. Together with maps of original and derived climate variables, based on interpolated data from local weather stations, species distribution-climate relationships have been assessed in a GIS. Based on these relationships several statistics describing the climatic characteristics of 397 European butterfly species have been developed and stored in CLIMBER.