Geospatial coordinate data for 125 species of New South Wales Drosophilidae (Diptera)

Label data from specimens in the Australian Museum (Sydney), and the Australian National Insect Collection (CSIRO, Canberra) have been compiled. Abundance data is excluded. Only those species collected within the mainland part of the geopolitical boundary of the Australian state of New South Wales are included; Norfolk Island and Lord Howe Island (McEvey, 2017) are excluded. To this dataset has been added distribution records from the literature, mainly works by Bock and Parsons (1970s and 1980s) and McEvey (1994, 2020) and from the shared datasets of colleagues Dr Michele Schiffer (Drosophila serrata; SourceNote = 3) and Prof. J.S.F. Barker (species associated with Opuntia cactus; SourceNote = 1). Coordinate accuracy is indicated as follows: a specimen of a species reported from the Blue Mountains, for example, without any other geospatial information, has very low “Coordinate Precision” indicated as ±100km (Precision 5); whereas a specimen collected at a high-accuracy GPS waypoint has very high “Coordinate Precision” indicated as ±10m to ±100m (Precision 1 to 2); a Precision 2 coordinate may lie within the range of a Precision 5-rated coordinate (for example Mount Wilson within the Blue Mountains). The taxonomy of a small number of species is problematic, in particular, uncertainty currently surrounds Drosophila repleta (SourceNote = 2), Scaptodrosophila notha and S. specensis (SourceNote = 4) (McEvey, unpubl.). As indicated by McEvey (1994, 2020), many of the 125 species known from NSW have distributions that extend beyond the political border, especially northwards into the Australian state of Queensland.