Geography of life histories in a tropical fauna: The case of Indian butterflies
Data files
Jul 07, 2025 version files 7.19 MB
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0_Distance_matrix.xlsx
6.91 MB
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0_Environmental_data_for_states.xlsx
20.58 KB
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0_Phylogeny_tree_of_Indian_butterflies.tre.tre
47.77 KB
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0_State_wise_butterfly_checklist.xlsx
120.64 KB
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0_Traits_data_for_butterflies.xlsx
93.69 KB
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README.md
3.24 KB
Abstract
To explore factors structuring a tropical butterfly fauna, separate effects of geography, climate, land covers, and socio-economic conditions, and to relate patterns due to the above groups of predictors to life history traits of the constituent species. Location: Republic of India, Indo-Malayan Realm. Taxon: A total of 1386 butterfly species. Checklist butterfly data for 36 Indian federal states and union territories were subject to ordination analyses, relating the species composition of the states' and territories' faunas to physical geography, climate, land covers, and socioeconomic conditions of the states. The patterns obtained were interpreted in terms of life history traits of the butterflies using the fourth-corner method, both ignoring and considering the phylogenetic signal in the environment × life history relationships. Physical geography was the strongest predictor of the states' butterfly faunas’ compositions. It was followed by climate, land covers, and socioeconomics. The main faunal structures separated the humid Northeast from the rest of the country, distinguished humid Western Ghats states from the rest, and grouped together peninsular mountains. Faunas of the humid northeastern and southwestern states contain larger butterflies developing on woody plants or large grasses; those of arid and high-altitude states contain small species developing on small forbs; whereas broad host plant scopes tend to be associated with shrubs and vines and large geographic ranges. Associations of body size to host plant forms were strongly phylogenetically dependent, whereas associations to range sizes were not. Analysing factors affecting regional species compositions of tropical faunas at a relatively crude level of such political units as Indian federal states and interpreting the resulting patterns by life history traits revealed intriguing relationships despite still incomplete knowledge of life histories of many of the Indian species. Much work on deciphering ecological requirements of individual species is still needed.
https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.mpg4f4r9r
Description of the data and file structure
Filename: 0_State_wise_butterfly_checklist.xlsx
Description: The matrix of all Indian butterfly species and their presence in 36 federal states and union territories is based on Das et al. (2023), updated with more recent records, obtaining a total of 1386 species by April 2024.
Filename: 0_Environmental_data_for_states.xlsx
Description: Predictors describing individual states contains the cardinal coordinates of the states’ centroids, area, their average altitude, and the difference between highest and lowest altitude viewed as a measure of topographic and habitat heterogeneity. For climate, four compound variables were produced from 19 bioclim variables using principal component analysis (WorldClim 2024). For land use and land covers, 24 statistics describing the conditions in Indian federal states, extracted using satellite imagery and provided by Bhuvan LULC 15-16 (Bhuvan 2023), and again simplified them using PCA. The six socioeconomic variables were easily available statistics describing conditions of individual states.
Filename: 0_Traits_data_for_butterflies.xlsx
Description: The butterfly life histories data contains the following information
- wing span (numeric, mm)
- larval host plant growth form (categorical, distinguishing forbs, shrubs, climbers/vines, trees, grasses, tall grasses, ants-dependent/carnivorous)
- larval plants scope (numeric), obtained as a simple sum of larval host plant growth forms
- distribution range in India, or number of states with positive occurrence (numeric, 1–36)
- global distribution range (ordinal at 1–5 scale, where 1 – particular region, ideally smaller than the area of India, 2 – size of India, 3 – greater than India but smaller than Oriental realm, 4 – greater than Oriental realm or size of a continent, 5 – Cosmopolitan)
Filename: 0_Distance_matrix.xlsx
Description: The distance matrix is based on Indian butterfly phylogeny tree, as a square dissimilarities matrix (in R, using function “cophenetic.phylo”).
Filename: 0_Phylogeny_tree_of_Indian_butterflies.tre.tre
Description: The phylogeny is based on Kawahara et al. (2023). We manually selected all the genera distributed in India and removed the remaining genera from the Kawahara’s list. Thus, modified list was modified to contain only Indian genera using “keep.tip” function from the R package ape (Paradis and Schliep 2019). Species not represented in the phylogeny tree were added to the roots of their respective genera, using the “add.species.to.genus” (R package phytools) (Revell 2024). The genera not available in the phylogeny tree were added to the close proximate node manually by following available individual phylogeny using function “bind.tip”. Lastly, we also removed any species not recorded in India from their genus root by utilizing the ape package “drop.tip” function.
For more detail see associated publication’s Material and Methods section.