Fanie Rautenbach’s Great LepiMAP Challenge 2020/21

Fanie Rautenbach has worked his way through the LepiMAP records for South Africa, Lesotho and Swaziland, has identified data gaps, and is challenging us to fill them. Fanie is the member of LepSoc Africa who takes the main responsibility for doing the identifications of butterflies in LepiMAP.

This blog does two things. Firstly, it lists all the species of butterfly for which we don’t have a photographic record in LepiMAP. Secondly, it lists the species for which there are photographic records in LepiMAP, but for which the most recent record was made more than five years ago, i.e. in 2014 or earlier. The Great LepiMAP Challenge for the summer of 2020/21 is to “refresh” the records for these species.

The LepiMAP database contains 477,000 records of butterflies, getting on for half a million. This is one of the largest databases of its kind in the world. For the butterfly atlas of South Africa, Lesotho and eSwatini (the SABCA project), we computerized every specimen record we could find. This included museums and private collections. This database goes back to the 19th century, although most of the records used for the butterfly atlas were made after the Second World War, in the second half of the 20th century, and from 2000 to 2010.

This blog consists of a series of four tables. Each table covers a time period. The first three tables are the 112 species that are not in LepiMAP as photographic records. The fourth table selects the 56 species that have not been “refreshed”, even once, since 2014. The column headers are mostly self-explanatory; the numbers in the column QDGC give the number of quarter degree grid cells in which the species has been recorded; the column records gives the total number of records for the species in the database. The two-letter codes are abbreviations for the provinces of South Africa, eS is eSwatini (Swaziland) and Les is Lesotho. The crosses show which of these political regions the species has been recorded in. Locality gives the general area where the species has been recorded. The numbers in the first column are in date order.

So Fanie’s first challenge to all LepiMAPpers is to get photographic records for these 168 species, and to upload them into the Virtual Museum. In the tables he has indicated the political regions they occur in, and there is a general description of the locality.

Fanie’s second challenge is to find the species in areas where they have not been recorded previously. (Many species have “traditional” sites where they get recorded, and for some species it is believed that they occur only on a single hilltop.) And then people have unexpectedly bumped into them at other sites, often at a considerable distance. Steve Woodhall’s talk at a BDI Citizen Scientist Hour called “Looking for butterflies” will help you learn how to go about doing butterfly fieldwork. And his book: “Fieldguide to Butterflies of South Africa” (reviewed here) gives the flight period for each species, so you know when to look. You can order a copy of this field guide by sending an email to Steve Woodhall.

We asked Steve to comment on this challenge: “This challenge is vital, as it carries on the great work done by LepSoc Africa and citizen scientists during the original SABCA project. Our understanding of our butterflies’ biogeography was increased immensely by SABCA, but LepiMAP record collecting for the project ended in July 2010, leading up to the publication of the Red List and Atlas in 2013. Environmental change has accelerated in the past 10 years, and we need to rise to this challenge to fill in the new gaps that Fanie has identified.”

This first table lists the 18 species for which there is not a single record in the LepiMAP database this century. The most recent record was made two decades ago. Amazingly, 12 of these 19 species are regarded as “Least Concern”. But this is due to the reality that many of them have wide ranges farther north in Africa. But it would be nice to know that the species persists at the edge of its range, in the southern end of Africa. (Because of the constraints of this format, you need to scroll out to the right to see the far ends of the tables – sorry! You can also download the tables as an Excel spreadsheet, or as a PDF)

The next table contains the 19 butterfly species that were last recorded between 2000 and 2007.

This big table contains the 74 butterfly species which were last recorded between 2008 and 2011, and which are not in LepiMAP as photographic records.

The table below the map & photo contains 56 species for which there are photographic records in LepiMAP, but the most recent record is five or more years old, and needs to be refreshed. The map and photo below are representative of this group of species. There are 56 records in the LepiMAP database going back to 1915. They come from 25 scattered quarter degree grid cells. But this species has eluded LepiMAPpers since Vaughan Jessnitz took this photo near Hoedspruit in 2011!

For a species to qualify for the table below, it needs to have a photographic record in LepiMAP. The cut-off date for being eligible is that the most recent record in LepiMAP must have been before 31 December 2014.

These 56 species have eluded LepiMAPpers since the beginning of 2015. Let us (a) refresh them, and (b) find new localities where they occur. Ten of the species are in threat categories. Two are “Data Deficient” (we don’t have enough information to classify them into a threat category). The rest are “Least Concern” (we have no worries about the persistence into the future). The way to confirm this “Least Concern” status is to get a better understanding of their distributions, and to maintain a steady stream of records, so we are certain that they are still present.

Although this blog focuses on the southern end of Africa, LepiMAP covers the whole continent, and the offshore islands. Within a few years, it would be fantastic to have sufficient data to do a blog like this for other countries and regions of Africa.

Footnote

 The Seventh BDI Citizen Scientist Hour, on 9 September 2020, was devoted to butterflies and LepiMAP. Fanie did a presentation on the Great LepiMAP Challenge. You can watch it here:

There were two other presentations on butterflies during this Citizen Scientist Hour. Oskar Brattström’s title was Butterflies – Africa’s most exciting animals and you can watch it here:

And the third presenter was Steve Woodhall, talking about Looking for butterflies. Here it is:

The BDI Citizen Scientist Hours are Zoom events. The presentations are recorded, and are uploaded to the BDI’s YouTube channel, which is here. To find out when the next Citizen Scientist Hour will take place, go to the Facebook page of BDI Citizen Science, and search under “events”.