The dataset contains COI barcodes of Lepidoptera caterpillars collected from a subtropical forest in Jiangxi, China.

Lepidopteran larvae were collected six times in 2017 and 2018 (April, June and September in each year). We collected all caterpillars by beating individual trees and knocking down resident insects. Lepidopteran caterpillars are much more restricted in their mobility than adult and flying insects and have a high probability of being collected from the trees they actually feed on (see also Wardhaugh et al., 2012). We beat the trees with a padded stick over a white sheet (1.5 m × 1.5 m) and collected all caterpillars knocked down from the trees (Schuldt et al., 2014). We sampled all trees in the first rows of each plot for a total 80 living trees in each plot. We used DNA-barcoding to identify herbivore-host plant associations along declining levels of tree diversity in a large-scale, subtropical biodiversity experiment. We tested for effects of tree species richness, host functional and phylogenetic diversity, and host functional (leaf trait) and phylogenetic composition and composition, and leaf trait composition on taxonomic species, phylogenetic, and network composition of herbivore communities. Our data from six sampling periods represent 6821 mitochondrial cytochrome c oxidase subunit I (COI) sequences of lepidopteran larvae, clustered into 447 molecular operational taxonomic units.