The Taiwan Moth Information Center has become Taiwan’s most comprehensive information retrieval Web site about moths and butterflies in Taiwan, with more than 800,000 searchable entries.
Established in 2014, the Web site (https://twmoth.tbri.gov.tw/) is maintained and operated by the center and has about 680,000 pieces of temporal and spatial distribution data, as well as images of moths and butterflies shared by citizen scientists in a Facebook group.
The other 125,000 pieces of data are digitized specimens collected by the center’s popular science promotion team in collaboration with volunteers from 153 locations nationwide.
Photo: Yang Yuan-ting, Taipei Times
Of the specimens, the center has identified 3,903 species from 1,812 genera and 78 families, which accounted for 74 percent of moths and butterflies known in Taiwan.
Director of the Taiwan Biodiversity Research Institute Yang Jia-dong (楊嘉棟) on Wednesday told a news conference that people tend to mistake beautiful moths for butterflies, as both insects belong to the order Lepidoptera and look similar.
“Taiwan has about 500 species of butterflies, while the number of moth species is about 5,000, 10 times more than butterflies,” he said, adding that both moths and butterflies are important pollinators for plants.
People are welcome to visit the site to learn more about differences between moths and butterflies or share information as a citizen scientist with the center, Yang said.
Institute research fellow Lin Hsu-hung (林旭宏) said the Web site offers multiple convenient search functions.
For example, identifiable photos of up to 300 species of moth larvae and adults can be displayed on a single page, where people can click on a photo and find detailed information about a moth or butterfly that interests them, he said.
Users can also search for host plants of moths or butterflies, or enter the name of a host plant to check moths or butterflies feeding on it, Lin said.
For advanced users, query conditions such as scientific names, data providers, administrative areas, observation locations or life cycles can be set up to obtain
detailed graphs and tables about the temporal and spatial distribution of moths or butterflies, Lin said.
However, data downloads are limited to 10,000 items to prevent service quality from being affected by mass downloads, he said, adding that users who reach the limit can link from the Web site to the center’s Global Biodiversity Information Facility dataset to source more information.
Tseng Tsan-jan (曾粲然), a junior-high school student who also attended the news conference, said that he became interested in observing moths when he visited a moth exhibition when he was in fifth grade.
He said he has been to many places in Taiwan to photograph moths and has provided his findings to the center, with the hope that he could discover a new moth species and introduce them to the world.
Additional reporting by CNA
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