RBINS Lepidoptera collection

Wouter Dekoninck1, Stijn Cooleman2, Patrick Semal1, Thomas Vandenberghe3, Franck Theeten4, Jean-Marc Herpers3, Stefan Kerkhof3

1 Royal Belgian Institute for Natural Sciences, Vautierstraat 29, 1000, Brussels, Belgium; 2 Belgian Biodiversity Platform, , Belgium; 3 Royal Belgian Institute for Natural Sciences, 1000, Brussels, Belgium; 4 Royal Museum for Central Africa, , Belgium

Corresponding author(s): Wouter Dekoninck (wdekoninck@naturalsciences.be), Stijn Cooleman (s.cooleman@biodiversity.be)

Received {date}; Revised {date}; Accepted {date}; Published {date}

Citation: Combination of authors, year of data paper publication (in parentheses), Title, Journal Name, Volume, Issue number (in parentheses), and doi of the data paper.

Abstract

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.

Keywords: Occurrence, Specimen, natural history collection, RBINS, DaRWIN, Insecta, Lepidoptera, Butterflies, Moths

Data published through GBIF: https://ipt.naturalsciences.be/resource?r=be_rbins_entomology_lepidoptera

Taxonomic coverage

Taxonomic ranks
Class: Insecta
Order: Lepidoptera

Spatial coverage

General spatial coverage: Worldwide
Coordinates: 90°0'0''S and 90°0'0''N Latitude; 180°0'0''W and 180°0'0''E Longitude 

Formation period: Mainly since 1900

Datasets

Dataset description
Object name: Darwin Core Archive RBINS Lepidoptera collection
Character encoding: UTF-8
Format name: Darwin Core Archive format
Format version: 1.0
Distribution: https://ipt.naturalsciences.be/archive.do?r=be_rbins_entomology_lepidoptera
Publication date of data: 2025-03-13
Language: English
Licences of use: Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC-BY-NC) 4.0 License

Metadata language: English
Date of metadata creation: 2024-10-15
Hierarchy level: Dataset