Understanding insect responses to global climate change involves identifying strategies used during past climate oscillations. Phylogeography offers a powerful framework to unravel how historical climatic and geological events have shaped the spatial genetic patterns of species, providing critical insights into evolutionary processes, whereas population genomic approaches enable finer‐scale resolution of demographic history an...

Aim Comparison between islands and equivalent mainland areas to dissect the effect of area, isolation and species traits in determining island genetic endemicity and genetic differentiation. Location The Western Mediterranean region. Time Period Current. Major Taxa Studied Butterflies (Lepidoptera, Papilionoidea). Methods We analysed 10,367 COI sequences from 105 species, 34 islands and 47 sea straits, along with four function...

The detection of local extinctions is often hindered by the lack of long-term monitoring schemes, and thus relies on time series of presence data. Recently, citizen science has repeatedly shown its value in documenting species occurrences. We investigated the effectiveness of unstructured citizen science records in reducing the perception of local extinctions in butterfly populations across Italian National Parks. We addressed...

Climate change represents a threat to narrow-ranged mountain species living in low-altitude massifs. We studied the disjunct Apennine population of Lasiommata petropolitana (Lepidoptera, Nymphalidae) in the Gran Sasso and Monti della Laga National Park. We quantified the altitudinal shifts undergone in the last decades (1964–2021) in the Alps and Apennines and estimated the local extinction risk due to climate change. We also...

Motivation Butterflies represent a model in biology and a flagship group for invertebrate conservation. We provide four new resources for the Western Palaearctic butterflies: (1) an updated checklist comprising 552 species; (2) a curated dataset of 32,126 mitochondrial cytochrome c oxidase subunit I ( COI ) sequences for 532 species, including a de novo reference library for the Maghreb (Morocco, northern Algeria and Tunisia)...

Endemics co‐occur because they evolved in situ and persist regionally or because they evolved ex situ and later dispersed to shared habitats, generating evolutionary or ecological endemicity centres, respectively. We investigate whether different endemicity centres can intertwine in the region ranging from Alps to Sicily, by studying their butterfly fauna. We gathered an extensive occurrence data set for butterflies of the stu...

Aim Occurrence data are fundamental to macroecology, but accuracy is often compromised when multiple units are lumped together (e.g., in recently separated cryptic species or in citizen science records). Using amalgamated data leads to inaccuracy in species mapping, to biased beta‐diversity assessments and to potentially erroneously predicted responses to climate change. We provide a set of R functions (biodecrypt) to objectiv...