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

Abstract

AbstractAimBiogeographical 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.LocationGlobal.TaxonOdonata (damselflies and dragonflies).MethodsOur 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.ResultsOf 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 ConclusionsThis 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.