Bringing Belize’s butterflies into the global biodiversity record
UB-ERI has published the first dataset from their 'Connecting protected area monitoring to national biodiversity reporting in Belize project to GBIF,' making records of fruit-feeding butterflies from Pook’s Hill openly available for research, conservation and biodiversity reporting.
Belize already has more than 7.8 million biodiversity occurrence records available through GBIF. However, around 95% of Belize’s GBIF occurrence records are birds, while insects account for fewer than 45,000. This highlights an important gap: groups such as butterflies and other invertebrates remain substantially underrepresented in the biodiversity data currently available through GBIF for Belize.
Photo credits: Frances Mullany
The newly published dataset helps address this gap. It contains occurrence records from surveys of fruit-feeding butterflies conducted at Pook’s Hill in 2016, as part of research that was published in 2018. Mobilizing these records through GBIF gives this historical dataset renewed value, allowing it to support new research, biodiversity assessments, conservation planning, and national and international reporting.
This is the first dataset published through UB-ERI’s wider effort to mobilize historical and current biodiversity monitoring data from across Belize. Through the 'Connecting protected area monitoring to national biodiversity reporting in Belize,' project, UB-ERI is working with researchers and protected-area co-managers to bring existing datasets onto GBIF and build a more representative picture of Belize’s biodiversity across species, places, and time.
Explore the dataset on GBIF:
