J.D. Lafontaine and J.T. Troubridge. 1998. Moths and Butterflies (Lepidoptera) in Smith, I.M., and G.G.E. Scudder, eds. Assessment of species diversity in the Montane Cordillera Ecozone. Burlington: Ecological Monitoring and Assessment Network, 1998.

MOTHS AND BUTTERFLIES
(LEPIDOPTERA)

J.D. Lafontaine
and
J.T. Troubridge

LEPIDOPTERA DISTRIBUTION DATA SOURCES

Detailed distributional information has been published for only a few groups of Lepidoptera in western Canada. Scott (1986) gives good distribution maps for butterflies in North America but these are generalized shade maps that give no detail within the Montane Cordillera Ecozone. A series of memoirs on the Inchworms (family 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 groups of Cutworm Moths (Family Noctuidae): the subfamily Plusiinae (Lafontaine and Poole, 1991), the subfamilies Cuculliinae and Psaphidinae (Poole, 1995), and the tribe Noctuini (subfamily Noctuinae) (Lafontaine, 1998) have also been published. Most fascicles in The Moths of America North of Mexico series (e.g. Ferguson, 1971-72, 1978; Franclemont, 1973; Hodges, 1971, 1986; Lafontaine, 1987; Munroe, 1972-74, 1976; Neunzig, 1986, 1990, 1997) are useful for identifying various moth groups but have little detailed distributional information. Check lists of the Macrolepidoptera of British Columbia (Jones, 1951) and the Lepidoptera of Alberta (Bowman, 1951) list most species but have limited distributional information. The recently published Butterflies of Canada (Layberry et al., 1998) is based on a distributional database on the butterflies of Canada maintained at the CNC which contains more than 90,000 records from public and private collections in Canada. The Butterflies of Canada includes dot maps for every species. In addition to these references, the vast amount of unpublished distributional information contained on the specimens in the Canadian National Collection (CNC) in Ottawa has been critical to the preparation of this analysis of Lepidoptera. These sources form the basis of the analysis of distribution patterns discussed below.