About the Site

Over 3,600 species are recorded in this database. The web site is a "work in progress," constantly being updated, and visitors will find that species occurrence information is more complete for some counties, states, provinces, and territories than others. Most records are based on museum specimens, authoritative monographs or other publications, or records from recognized experts. Additional families, photos, species accounts, and distribution maps are added as funds and time permit. Distribution maps are currently limited to states of the conterminous United States and Mexico. Data for Alaska, Hawaii, and the Canadian provinces are in preparation.

This resource should be cited as: Opler, Paul A., Harry Pavulaan, Ray E. Stanford, Michael Pogue, coordinators. 2006. Butterflies and Moths of North America. Bozeman, MT: Big Sky Institute. http://www.butterfliesandmoths.org/ (Version MMDDYYYY)

An NBII Partnership
In 2004, the Big Sky Institute (BSI) at Montana State University received funding from the the USGS National Biological Information Infrastructure (NBII) program to manage and maintain the Butterflies and Moths of North America web sites that were originally developed by the USGS Northern Prairie Wildlife Research Center. Staff members from BSI redeveloped the sites to create an interactive, searchable, and updateable web-enabled database of butterfly and moth records. Dynamic maps are updated in "real time," meaning that they change immediately when new records are added to the database.

History of Butterflies and Moths of North America
The Butterflies and Moths of North America Web sites were conceived and developed by a team of scientists at Northern Prairie Wildlife Research Center in 1995 and were inspired by paper atlases created by Paul Opler, Harry Pavulaan, Ray Stanford, and their many cooperators. The mission, in part, of Northern Prairie's Grassland Ecosystem Initiative was to work with others to assess the biotic resources of the Great Plains, to facilitate information sharing among agencies, organizations, and individuals, and to synthesize that information. Development of the Butterflies and Moths of North America Web sites was a logical avenue for furthering the goal of making information on the biotic resources of the Great Plains more widely available to decision-makers, resource managers, scientists, and the public. These resources achieved almost instant success and quickly became the most popular of the more then 400 biological resources on the Northern Prairie Web site. Today Butterflies and Moths of North America enjoy a new home under the auspices of the National Biological Information Infrastructure. Shane C. Erstad, Douglas H. Johnson, and Terry L. Shaffer from Northern Prairie were instrumental in the inception and development of the resources. Approximately 50 students from Jamestown College coded the data, prepared the photographs, and formatted the species accounts. Thomas K. Buhl and the late David P. Fellows responded to the thousands of e-mail inquiries that the resource spawned.

Information for Users
Visitors who want to identify an unknown butterfly or moth should review our Frequently Asked Questions for instructions on using this site for identification assistance.

Visitors to the site can make a valuable contribution by helping to establish new records for species that are presently included in the site. If you find a species or record of a species in a county beyond the range shown in the species distribution map, please follow instructions in the Frequently Asked Question: How Can I Report a New Record for a Moth or Butterfly?

Authors
Coordination of data compilation is provided by Dr. Paul A. Opler, with assistance from Harry Pavulaan and Ray Stanford. Staff members from the Big Sky Institute (Montana State University) are responsible for creation and maintenance of the web site.