BUTTERFLIES AND MOTHS
(Lepidoptera)
J.D. Lafontaine
LEPIDOPTERA DISTRIBUTION
Detailed distributional information has been published for only a few groups of Lepidoptera. Both Opler (1992) and Scott (1986) give good distribution maps for butterflies in eastern North America and North America respectively but these are generalized shade maps that give no detail within the Mixedwood Plains Ecozone. A series of memoirs on the Geometridae of Canada by McGuffin (1967, 1972, 1977, 1981, 1987) and Bolte (1990) cover about 3/4 of the Canadian fauna and include dot maps for most species. A long term project on the "Forest Lepidoptera of Canada" resulted in a four volume series on Lepidoptera that feed on trees in Canada and these also give dot maps for most species (McGugan, 1958; Prentice, 1962, 1963, 1965). Dot maps for three subfamilies of the Noctuidae, the Plusiinae (Lafontaine and Poole, 1991) and the Cuculliinae and Psaphidinae (Poole, 1995) have also been published. Other books (e.g. Rockburne and Lafontaine, 1976, and Covell, 1984; Hodges, 1971; Ferguson, 1971-72) are useful for identifying various moth groups but have little distributional information. A check list of the Lepidoptera of Ontario (Riotte, 1992) lists the macrolepidoptera and most of the group II microlepidoptera (see below) but has only limited distributional information. In addition to these references, two additional sources of information have been critical to the preparation of this analysis of Lepidoptera: the first is the vast amount of unpublished distributional information contained on the specimens in the Canadian National Collection (CNC) in Ottawa; the second source is a distributional database on the butterflies of Canada maintained at the CNC which contains about 100,000 records. These sources form the basis of the analysis of distribution patterns discussed below.