Entomology

Trends in Butterfly Populations in UK Gardens

Annual abundance indices and trends for 22 butterfly species in UK gardens over 2007-2020, from the BTO Garden BirdWatch citizen monitoring scheme.

Size
52.9 kB
Format
CSV, TXT
License
CC-BY-4.0
Access
Open Access
Source
Zenodo (record 7749600)

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Challenge

Across the 22 UK garden butterfly species, which rose or fell the most between 2007 and 2020, and was there a single year when almost all of them crashed together?

Where to start
Load bfly_garden_collated_indices.csv and use the lci column (log10 index, anchored to 2.0 in 2007) to get each species' abundance relative to 2007 via 10**(lci-2). Rank all species with the % trend column in bfly_garden_trends.csv (scheme='GBW', years='2007-2020'), then average the relative index across species per year to look for a shared bad year.
What to share
A ranked winners-and-losers bar chart of the 22 species, a relative-abundance time series for the top risers and the main decliner (the Wall), and a community-index or heatmap view identifying the 2012 synchronised dip.

💬 Discuss this dataset, ask questions and share your results in its discussion thread. Challenges are open-ended — there's no single right answer.