A compilation of larval host-plant records for six families of butterflies (Lepidoptera: Papilionoidea) from available electronic resources

This dataset contains 43645 association records for 3787 butterfly species and 6870 host-plant taxa from Encyclopedia of Life (EOL), Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), Wikipedia, Butterflies of America (BoA) and the HOSTS database at the Natural History Museum in London (HOSTS DB).

Records where extracted using different techniques such as html-scraping, API requests, and text-mining (keyword and taxonomic name matching, see details in http://papilionoidea.myspecies.info/content/data-extraction-protocol). Butterfly and plant names where validated with current taxonomic checklists and web services (http://www.ucl.ac.uk/taxome/gbn/, ftp://ftp.funet.fi/pub/sci/bio/life/intro.html, http://www.theplantlist.org/). A subset of the data was validated manually to check for error in names or in the association, some records were excluded, but there are still  several dubious or unvetted records in the dataset. Please use the links provided to check the sources, some might contain citations to the original references. 

This dataset complements data available at higher taxonomic levels (Ferrer-Paris et al. 2013)

This work was supported by a 2013 EOL Rubenstein Research Fellowship Award.

References:

Ferrer-Paris JR, Sánchez-Mercado A, Viloria ÁL, Donaldson J (2013) Congruence and Diversity of Butterfly-Host Plant Associations at Higher Taxonomic Levels. PLoS ONE 8(5): e63570. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0063570