DOI: 10.5061/dryad.0cfxpnw6m
title: Data for: Combining environmental niche models, multi-grain analyses, and species traits identifies pervasive effects of land use on butterfly biodiversity across Italy

description: Understanding how species respond to human activities is paramount to
 ecology and conservation science, one outstanding question being how
 large-scale patterns in land use affect biodiversity. To facilitate
 answering this question, we propose a novel analytical framework that
 combines Environmental Niche Models, multi-grain analyses, and species
 traits. We illustrate the framework capitalizing on the most extensive
 dataset compiled to date for the butterflies of Italy (106,514
 observations for 288 species), assessing how agriculture and urbanization
 have affected biodiversity of these taxa from landscape to regional scales
 (3–48 km grains) across the country while accounting for its steep
 climatic gradients. Multiple lines of evidence suggest pervasive and
 scale-dependent effects of land use on butterflies in Italy. While land
 use explained patterns in species richness primarily at grains ≤ 12 km,
 idiosyncratic responses in species highlighted “winners” and “losers”
 across human-dominated regions. Detrimental effects of agriculture and
 urbanization emerged from landscape (3-km grain) to regional (48-km grain)
 scales, disproportionally affecting small butterflies and butterflies with
 a short flight curve. Human activities have therefore reorganized the
 biogeography of Italian butterflies, filtering out species with poor
 dispersal capacity and narrow niche breadth not only from local
 assemblages but also from regional species pools. These results suggest
 that global conservation efforts neglecting large-scale patterns in land
 use risk falling short of their goals, even for taxa typically assumed to
 persist in small natural areas (e.g., invertebrates). Our study also
 confirms that consideration of spatial scales will be crucial to
 implementing effective conservation actions in the Post-2020 Global
 Biodiversity Framework. In this context, applications of the proposed
 analytical framework have broad potential to identify which mechanisms
 underlie biodiversity change at different spatial scales. 
 Funding statement: FR is supported by the PROBAE project “Protect
 butterflies across Europe through climate refugia” funded by the European
 Commission through Horizon 2020, Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA)
 individual fellowship, reintegration panel (Grant agreement ID:
 101024579). Open Access Funding provided by Universita degli Studi di
 Torino within the CRUI-CARE Agreement.
description: The data preparation is described in detail in Riva et al. (2023)
 "Combining environmental niche models, multi-grain analyses, and
 species traits identifies pervasive effects of land use on butterfly
 biodiversity across Italy", in the journal Global Change Biology
 (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/gcb.16615).
description: Analyses presented in the manuscript can be replicated using
 software R. For estimating variable importance for Maxent models, the Java
 version of Maxent must also be installed on the machine.