Portuguese Lepidoptera records compiled by Martin Corley's database

Study Extent

The geographic scope of this study focuses on observed Lepidoptera in mainland Portugal, between 1989 and 2018.

Sampling

Sampling had as sampling protocol several methods, all of them described in the database. Some examples are MV lights, Heath traps, House lights and Black actinic trap.

Quality Control

All initial data was inserted in a specific relational database built specifically for the project, which implemented several quality control methods. In the preparation of the dataset for GBIF publication, data consistency was verified using cluster algorithms using OpenRefine.

Method steps

1. The present data were obtained from a personal database of Martin Corley, from which the records where column “Recorder” contained “Martin Corley” were filtered in Open Refine – in order to select only the personal records and not the bibliographic ones. The document with only the lines referring to these records was exported in excel.
2. Through the column with the original coordinates (GRID = verbatimCoordinates) a procv was made to the document with their translation to decimal coordinates (decimalLatitude and decimalLongitude) as well as all the arguments related to the location (locality, municipality, stateProvince, country, countryCode, coordinateUncertaintyInMeters and coordinatePrecision). The column geodeticDatum = WGS84 and verbatimSRS = PT-TM06/ETRS89 was added.
3. The column of the authors of the records (recordedBy) was placed in DwC format with the name of the authors separated by “|”.
4. All rows had dates, so the separation into day, month, year was made and then the eventDate column was created with the date in ISO format. Date consistency was checked and 61 records with wrong dates were removed (eg 3801-02-01; 0801-02-01).
5. The associatedTaxa column was created, where the prefix “host” was placed in all cells that contained information in the host column. The lifeStage column was created, where the similar terms were minimized: cases = case; larval nests = larval nest; cocoons = cocoon; larva and pupa = larva | pupa. The zeros and NA became empty cells. A single list of protocols was created and minimized to similar terms.
6. Mandatory columns were added: type, modified, license, collectionCode, datasetName, basisOfRecord, occurrenceStatus. The ASWASNAME name was changed to scientificName.
7. The dataset was run in the Species Extractor application to extract the fields acceptedNameUsage, kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, specificEpithet, infraspecificEpithet and taxonRank. The matchType and confidence columns are automatically extracted, which allow evaluating the differences between scientificName and acceptedNameUsage. For scientificName “FUZZY” writing errors were verified, for this, the taxonomicStatus column was added where the indication “misspelled” was placed for these cases. For the scientificName “HIGHERRANK”, the unique names were copied and the names were manually verified on the platform https://www.lusoborboletaspt.com/. Next, the scientificNameAuthorship and acceptedNameUsage columns were updated with the new information.
8. Duplicates have been removed using eventDate, scientificName, verbatimCoordinates, and associatedReferences columns. Using OpenRefine, the associatedReferences column was standardized.

This dataset includes 51475 records referring to specimens of 68 different families, 925 genera and 2311 species/subspecies.

1. Animalia
   rank: kingdom
2. Arthropoda
   rank: phylum
3. Insecta
   rank: class
4. Lepidoptera
   rank: order

The occurrences are in mainland Portugal.