Skip to main content
Dryad

Local entomologists shine a light on moth communities: The value of amateur records in cataloguing long-term change

Ashe-Jepson, Esme123; Driver, Louis M. B.1; Mitford, Emily V.1; Stebbings, Russell1; Tait, Max E.14; Wallis, Sky M.5; Turner, Edgar C.13

Published Jul 01, 2025 on Dryad. https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.hhmgqnkth

Data files

Jul 01, 2025 version files 3.77 MB

Click names to download individual files

Abstract

The University Museum of Zoology (Cambridge) (UMZC) recently received a collection of macro-moths from the late Gerald Maurice Haggett (1927-2019) (generously donated by his family), which included an estimated 40,000 macro-moth specimens, and 17 books containing written records of moths and other Lepidoptera and wildlife observations. The majority of these records were his own, but the collection also included several written works from other people (listed below). The Museum similarly received a separate donation of written records from the late Colin Smith (1927-1997).

The data presented here are transcriptions of written records kept by several amateur collectors in the UK across the last 82 years: Gerald Maurice Haggett, Reverend Cyril Alfred Drummond Ash (1856-1949), and Colin Smith. Records were extracted, species names updated using the NHM Species Dictionary, and separated by life stage, sampling method, location, and observer. Please note to protect the locations of some species, all species locations have been reduced to the county level. Further, in line with the wishes of the donors, all records of larvae that are not Least Concern (species conservation status according to Fox, et al. 2019) have been omitted. This will impact counts of records, but as larvae were not used in any analyses, this will not have impacted any of the results presented in the manuscript outside of those total counts.

In order to understand how the newly acquired collection of specimens fit into the existing collection at the museum, we undertook a project to count and compare this new collection of macro-moths with the existing collection at UMZC. There is a separate dataset for that collection of biological specimens, including counts per life stage and in which collection.

Written records are often discarded instead of deposited alongside biological collections in museums. Though the use of biological collections to study long-term change has increased over the years, the use of the associated written records has been less noticeable. As such, we demonstrate several uses of written records, including testing for changes in phenology, and species richness and abundance.

The data presented here is largely in two forms. Firstly, a count of species by life stage of biological specimens present in the new collection and in the existing UMZC collection, for comparison purposes. Secondly, the digitised written records. The use of each dataset in the paper are explained in the accompanying code (analysed in R). There is a separate dataset for an associated collection of biological specimens, there were also collected by several people, with the largest contributions from Gerald Maurice Haggett, and Harold Edward (Ted) Hammond (1902-1963). For the written records, the dataset has been reformatted to streamline the code in several ways from the original structure, and so in some cases, there are multiple versions of the dataset included here. Their use and reformatting is explained in the code.