A digitised specimen-level database of the Arthur Bott Lepidoptera collection

<title>Abstract</title> <p>Historical insect collections hold century-scale records of species distributions and phenotypic traits, yet the majority remain undigitised. We present a specimen-level database of 5,974 Lepidoptera records from the private collection of Arthur Bott (Poppenhausen, Lower Franconia, Germany), covering the period 1900–2002 and encompassing 712 taxa across 351 genera. Records include 129 specimens from 19 species classified as extinct in Bavaria and 163 specimens from 30 endangered species, as well as 156 specimens of 14 species listed in Annex II and 293 specimens of 19 species listed in Annex IV of the EU Fauna–Flora–Habitat Directive. The data are organised in a normalised SQLite schema that separates specimen, species, location and trait information, with stable identifiers linking each record to external resources (GBIF, BOLD Systems, EOL and Wikipedia). Data are exportable in Darwin Core and ABCD XML formats. Image-derived colour brightness values are provided for 77 specimens of Euphydryas aurinia sampled across an Alpine altitudinal gradient from 600 to 2,300 m.</p>