DOI: 10.5285/cc6b5e83-a1f4-40d6-bbbb-64366b002418
title: Insect species richness for each plant species and insect-plant interactions from the Database of Insects and their Food Plants [DBIF]

description: This dataset consists of 4,397 insect species associated with 679 native plant species, 120 archaeophytes, and 223 neophytes from the Database of Insects and their Food Plants (DBIF). The DBIF details approximately 60,000 interactions between phytophagous insect (and mite) species and plants recorded in Great Britain over the last century, based on a wide variety of sources, including entomological journals and field guides. The data here represents a reduced subset of the full DBIF (13,277 interactions), only including interactions resolved to the species level (insect species x associated with host plant species y), records that have been expertly verified as reliable and included in previous large-scale analyses (Ward 1988; Ward & Spalding 1993; Ward et al. 1995; Ward et al. 2003), and records that are certain to have occurred in Great Britain. Any records originating from captive breeding studies are excluded. Finally, only plants with associated phylogenetic data and native status are included. Host plant distribution size is also included, in addition to a quantification of the distinctiveness of the insect communities found on a subset of the non-native plants.

This work was supported by the Natural Environment Research Council award number NE/R016429/1 as part of the UK-SCAPE programme delivering National Capability.
description: For a full description of all processes involved in data collection/generation see the supporting documentationsupplied with this data.

In summary, the following processes were applied to the full DBIF dataset in order to generate this dataset: 
- Only data on ‘higher’ plants (seed plants and ferns) were included, using only insect-plant records that were expertly verified as reliable and included in previous large-scale analyses (Ward 1988; Ward & Spalding 1993; Ward et al. 1995; Ward et al. 2003)
- Only records that were certain to have occurred in Great Britain were included, and any records originating from captive breeding studies were excluded
- All records not at a species level were removed, and all sub-species/cultivar/variety information were ‘upgraded’ to the species level
- Several sources were used to group together plant and insect species listed under different synonyms
- Native status and introduction dates (for neophytes) were assigned to plants from several data sources, with plants classified as neophyte (non-native, arrived post-1500), archaeophyte (non-native, arrived pre-1500), or native (primarily Holocene colonists)
- Distribution size was quantified as the number of hectads (10 x 10 km grid squares) that a plant was recorded in between 1987-1999 (within Great Britain including the Isle of Man – vice counties 1-112)
- Phylogenetic relationships between plants were trimmed from a recently published global phylogeny of vascular plants, producing a custom phylogeny
- Four phylogenetic isolation measures were calculated
- Insect community distinctiveness was defined as the Chao-Sorensen abundance-based dissimilarity between the insect community on a given non-native host, and the insect pool found on native plants within the DBIF
- Only plants that hosted an insect richness ≥ 10 were included, ensuring that host plants had been sufficiently sampled for dissimilarity calculations
- All DBIF data sources were trimmed down to the article level by removing page number information