Deliberately introduced dung beetles in Australia: 12 years of occurrence and abundance records from 2001 to 2022.

Abstract

Since 1968, the Australian Dung Beetle Project has carried out field releases of 43 deliberately introduced dung beetle species for the biological control of livestock dung and dung-breeding pests. Of these, 23 species are known to have become established. For most of these species, sufficient time has elapsed for population expansion to fill the extent of their potential geographic range through both natural and human-assisted dispersal. Consequently, over the last 20 years, extensive efforts have been made to quantify the current distribution of these introduced dung beetles, as well as the seasonal and spatial variation in their activity levels. Much of these data and their associated metadata have remained unpublished, and they have not previously been synthesized into a cohesive dataset. Here, we collate and report data from the three largest dung beetle monitoring projects from 2001 to 2022. Together, these projects encompass data collected from across Australia, and include records for all 23 species of established dung beetles introduced for biocontrol purposes. In total, these data include 22,718 presence records and 213,538 absence records collected during 10,272 sampling events at 546 locations. Most presence records (97%) include abundance data. In total, 1,752,807 dung beetles were identified as part of these data. The distributional occurrence and abundance data can be used to explore questions such as factors influencing dung beetle species distributions, dung beetle biocontrol, and insect-mediated ecosystem services. These data are provided under a CC-BY-NC 4.0 license and users are encouraged to cite this data paper when using the data.