Citizen science monitoring programs have collected data on presence, abundance and distribution of butterfly species (Papilionoidea and Hesperoidea) across North America on a regular basis; some for up to forty years. These observations are fundamental for analyzing trends in butterfly populations over time and space in response to environmental changes, and are all the more valuable because butterflies, with differing requirements for larval and adult stages, are particularly good bioindicators of ecosystem disturbance. In the last 15 years, citizen scientist enthusiasm to participate in butterfly monitoring has sparked a tremendous expansion of new survey projects that would otherwise not be feasible. The North American Butterfly Monitoring Network (http://www.thebutterflynetwork.org/) tracks 30+ independent programs ranging in scope from local to continental, all which recruit local citizen scientists to collect field observations. No global naming authority yet exists for butterflies, so the programs operate using a taxon list of their own choosing, which may or may not derive from a published, authoritative list. To look at broad-scale patterns, data must be integrated across independent monitoring projects, but species and subspecies-level name conflicts significantly complicate integration of data among projects, and in some cases integration is impossible. To resolve as many issues as possible, we developed a data structure to act as a bridge in interpreting nomenclatural discrepancies. We aligned a cumulative total of 3201 species names and 3282 subspecies names from the three most recently published North American butterfly taxonomic checklists: NABA 2nd edition (2001), Opler and Warren (2003), and Pelham (2014) and North American species from the global Integrated Taxonomic Information Service (ITIS) to characterize and resolve all discrepancies. Pair-wise agreement between these base lists ranged from 78% to 95%. We worked with 10 programs to identify which of these base taxonomies their list most closely resembled and to record any name deviations from that base. The project taxon lists ranged in size from 80 to 244 taxa. None of the lists matched a base list exactly; the highest number of deviations between a project list and its base list was 22. Most deviations were due to generic-level disagreements. Our alignment unambiguously relates any name from any participating survey group to the equivalently defined taxonomic entity on any other participating group’s list. Defining comparable relationships between authorities allows essential cross-talk among the multitude of established and newly developing research agendas monitoring the dynamic occurrences of North American butterflies.

1. Bridging Discrepancies across North
American Butterfly Naming Authorities:
Supporting Citizen Science Data
Integration
Dana L Campbell, Anne E Thessen, Leslie Ries
annethessen@gmail.com
http://www.slideshare.net/athessen
@diatomsRcool
The Data Detektiv

2. Acknowledgements
• DBI – 1052875
• DEB - 1541557

3. Lepidopteran Monitoring
© Cláudio Dias Timm CC BY-NC-SA via Flickr and EOL
© 1999 California Academy of
Sciences CC BY-NC-SA via CalPhotos
and EOL
© michael_hodge CC BY via iNaturalist and EOL
By Andy Potter CC BY-SA via
Wikimedia Commons and EOL

4. Lepidopteran Monitoring
Photo by Bernard Dupont
Bioindicator
© Ted Kropiewnicki CC BY-NC-SA via Tree of Life Web Project and
EOL
Pollinator
Prey

5. Lepidopteran Monitoring
By Gail Gilliland, blogs.plos.org
wildresearch.ca
burrenbeo.com
By Kelly Donovan

6. Lepidopteran Monitoring
• North American
Butterfly Monitoring
Network
• Standardize protocols
(Pollard Walk)
• Develop data
management systems
(PollardBase)

7. Lepidopteran Monitoring

8. Lepidopteran Classifications
• ITIS
• NABA 2001
• Pelham 2014
• Opler & Warren 2005
Base List Number of taxa Number of species
Pelham 2827 820
Opler Warren 1043 784
NABA 1090 731
ITIS 2810 866
Subfamily
Deviation
Genus
Deviation
Lumping/
Splitting
Spelling
Species
Name
Unmatched
Taxon
ITIS/NABA 66 28 63 13 28 21
ITIS/OW 110 15 11 2 9 13
ITIS/Pelham 49 16 7 1 5 19
OW/NABA 69 34 62 11 22 17
OW/Pelham 159 28 13 3 14 27
NABA/Pelham 105 35 63 11 34 37

9. Project Lists
Project Start Year Base List
Number of
Species
Base List
Species
Deviations
Area (sq mi)
Illinois 1986 NABA 143 4 7,000
Michigan 2011 NABA 136 2 97,000
Colorado 2013 OW 244 22 104,000
Tennessee 2014 NABA 136 8 42,000
Irvine Ranch 2012 OW 80 8 50,000 acres
Cascades 2011 Pelham 152 4
Iowa 2007 NABA 119 2 56,000
Florida 2003 OW 192 8 66,000
MPG Ranch Pelham 101 15
Ohio 1995 NABA 165 7 45,000

10. Project Lists
Project
Species
Complex
Spelling Generic
Species
name
Unmatched
Taxon
Lumping/
Splitting
Total
Illinois 2 2 1 0 1 0 6
Michigan 1 1 0 0 0 0 2
Colorado 0 2 12 1 7 0 22
Tennessee 2 1 5 0 0 0 8
Irvine Ranch 0 0 1 0 6 1 8
Cascades 0 0 1 1 0 2 4
Iowa 0 0 2 0 0 0 2
Florida 0 0 4 0 3 1 8
MPG Ranch 4 2 3 0 0 6 15
Ohio 0 4 1 0 1 1 7
Total 9 12 30 2 18 11 80

11. Doing the Alignment
• Manual alignment of the four
base lists
• Projects declared a base list and
recorded discrepancies
• Used nomenclature and
geography
Celastrina ladon complex
Red = C. ladon
Blue = C. lucia
Green = C. neglecta
Purple = C. idella
Grey = C. echo
Yellow = C. humulus

12. Data Access
• Manual alignments
• Darwin Core Archive
• https://github.com/diatomsRcool/butterfly

13. Data Integration
• MPG Ranch Speyeria hesperis
• Equivalent in Ohio?
Speyeria hesperis
MPG Ranch
Speyeria hesperis
Pelham
Speyeria atlantis hesperis
NABA
Speyeria atlantis
Ohio

14. Data Integration
• Colorado Adelpha eulalia
• Equivalent in Cascades?
Adelpha eulalia
Colorado
Adelpha bredowii
O&W
Adelpha californica
Adelpha eulalia
Pelham
Adelpha californica
Cascades
© Jerry Oldenettel CC BY-NC-SA
via EOL and Fickr

15. Conclusions
• Local projects and citizen scientists are
important for Lepidopteran monitoring
• Large-scale problems require data integration
across projects
• We successfully built crosswalks between four
classifications and ten project lists
• Names infrastructure for integrating butterfly
data

16. Questions?
CC BY-NC via Flickr and EOL