Art Shapiro's Butterfly Site

This website describes over 34 years of data collected by Dr. Arthur Shapiro, professor of Evolution and Ecology at the University of California, Davis, in his continuing effort to regularly monitor butterfly population trends on a transect across central California. Ranging from the Sacramento River delta, through the Sacramento Valley and Sierra Nevada mountains, to the high desert of the western Great Basin, fixed routes at ten sites have been surveyed at approximately two-week intervals since as early as 1972. The sites represent the great biological, geological, and climatological diversity of central California.

As of the end of 2006, Dr. Shapiro has logged 5476 site-visits and tallied approximately 83,000 individual records of 159 butterfly species and subspecies. This major effort is continuing and represents the world’s largest dataset of intensive site-specific data on butterfly populations collected by one person under a strict protocol. We have also collated monthly climate records for the entire study period from weather stations along the transect.

We built this website as a portal for Dr. Shapiro’s data and observations, supported by National Science Foundation Biological Databases and Informatics Grant DBI-0317483. Much of the data is freely available (Please Contact Us for more information).

We created three educational modules for high school and college level instructors in lessons about species composition and climate change. They incorporate specific aspects of butterfly natural history, phenology, long-term population dynamics, and statistical analysis, using the data from this site. They also comply with California high school education standards.

Special thanks goes out to the crew who helped Art when they could and contributed material for this website.

Table 1. Characteristics of Butterfly Monitoring Sites, Listed from West to East