RBINS Lepidoptera collection

Description

The butterflies and moths subcollections constitute a grand part of the institute's entomology collection. They were initially classified in the suborders as Rhopalocera and Heterocera, respectively. More than 35,000 butterflies and moths specimen records are digitised, including around 1090 type specimens that are online findable through the RBINS Virtual Collections (https://virtualcollections.naturalsciences.be/virtual-collections/entomology/lepidoptera). Most of the georeferenced holotypes, paratypes and syntypes originate from Central Africa and Southeast Asia. Generally through expeditions in tropical regions, a vast amount of insect specimens used to be sampled and stored in museum cabinet drawers: many of those records are retrievable through the RBINS Entomology Collections webpages (https://collections.naturalsciences.be/ssh-entomo/collections). Baron Edmond de Sélys Longchamps belongs to the historically important collectors of butterflies and moths. Even Queen Elisabeth and her son Prince/King Leopold III of Belgium have notably contributed to the RBINS lepidoptera collection. More recent, eminent scientific contributions with reference material at RBINS originate from Belgian lepidopterists including Arsène Fouassin, Philippe Fastré and Thierry Bouyer. This Fastré collection largely contains Erebidae and Noctuidae from Central and South Asia. Diversely, this Bouyer collection is one of the largest worldwide and nearly complete Afrotropical Saturniidae collection.

Data Records

The data in this occurrence resource has been published as a Darwin Core Archive (DwC-A), which is a standardized format for sharing biodiversity data as a set of one or more data tables. The core data table contains 31,318 records.

1 extension data tables also exist. An extension record supplies extra information about a core record. The number of records in each extension data table is illustrated below.

Occurrence (core)
31318
Multimedia
325

This IPT archives the data and thus serves as the data repository. The data and resource metadata are available for download in the downloads section. The versions table lists other versions of the resource that have been made publicly available and allows tracking changes made to the resource over time.

Downloads

Download the latest version of this resource data as a Darwin Core Archive (DwC-A) or the resource metadata as EML or RTF:

Data as a DwC-A file	download 31,318 records in English (3 MB) - Update frequency: unknown
Metadata as an EML file	download in English (10 kB)
Metadata as an RTF file	download in English (8 kB)

Versions

The table below shows only published versions of the resource that are publicly accessible.

Rights

Researchers should respect the following rights statement:

The publisher and rights holder of this work is Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC-BY-NC) 4.0 License.

GBIF Registration

This resource has been registered with GBIF, and assigned the following GBIF UUID: b90c7bee-49ac-46b3-8e19-cd7d1adf49f3. Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences publishes this resource, and is itself registered in GBIF as a data publisher endorsed by Belgian Biodiversity Platform.