GENERAL INTRODUCTION

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reasons. Based an the likelihood of misidentifications in some species or the risk of mislabelling or misspelling in large collections, they were ignored for estimating species' ranges - although future sampling might, of course, prove them to be correct. Records were entered into a Geographic Information System (GIS: ArcView 3.2), which allowed displaying them by species, subspecies, record accuracy, altitude or year of sampling (if known). As a base map the world map of ArcView seemed sufficiently detailed, although some small islands in the Philippine/Moluccan region and the South Pacific were missing (these were hand-digitized from various naval maps and inserted into the world map where necessary). A number of freely available, GIS-compatible habitat maps were used to 'underlay' the species records in order to determine patterns of distribution. Altitudinal relief, Vegetation zones, precipitation and minimum winter temperature often matched the outer limit of records, and a number of apparently important parameters for moth distributions could be i dentified (see also chapter 4.2, Beck & Kitching 2004 for details). Uneven sampling effort in different regions can disturb this straightforward procedure: Whereas an unrecorded species in well-sampled northern Thailand or northeast Borneo probably indicates its absence from that region, it is most unlikely to do so in undersampled Laos, Burma/Myanmar or southern (Indonesian) Borneo. Furthermore, certain species are more likely to be overlooked (or misidentified) than others. Taking all these factors into consideration, the best possible estimate of each species range was digitized. Area sizes and other measures of distribution can easily be calculated from the range estimates (e.g. Hooge et al. 1999) and recorded and estimated species checklists for regions (countries, islands, gridsquares) can be extracted from overlaid range maps. Similar approaches to estimating Lepidoptera species ranges have previously been used in computerised (e.g. Cowley et al. 2000) and non-computerised (Hausmann 2000, pers. com . ) form. The use of GIS does not only make it easier and more precise to find distribution patterns by overlapping the records with maps of potentially important habitat parameters, but it also allows to use the resulting range maps for further computer-aided analysis. However, no explicit computer model was used here to estimate ranges (see also Holloway et al. 2003 for a `semi-computerised' habitat model). Computer models have been successfully used for range estimates an a smaller geographic scale (e.g. Raxworthy et al. 2003, Ray et al. 2002, Iverson & Prasad 1998) and would be desirable for their fast applicability to a large number of species. However, the analysis of presence-only data which is typical for museum data (Graham et al. 2004) is still problematic for statistical habitat models (e.g. Zaniewski et al. 2002, Cowley et al. 2000). A computerised habitat model (M. Wegmann & J. Beck, preliminary trails using Diva-GIS: Hijmans et al. 2001, 2004) was felt to perform inferior in tackling the biases in data quality (e.g. Graham et al. 2004, Sobern et al. 2000, Fagan & Kareiva 1997). Despite the apparent 'subjectivity' of the approach that was chosen here, a 'brain-model' (as opposed to a computer model) is probably still more precise due to an easier consideration of species differences, be it ecological requirements, if known, or recording constraints. However, rapid methodological advances make computerised GIS models a very promising future Option (e.g. Segurado & Araujo 2004, Engler et al. 2004, Rushton et al. 2004, Lehmann et al. 2003, Mackey & Lindenmayer 2001).