Annotated checklist of the beetles (Coleoptera) of the California Channel Islands

Matthew L Gimmel; M Andrew Johnston; Michael S Caterino

doi:10.7717/peerj.14793

Annotated checklist of the beetles (Coleoptera) of the California Channel Islands

PeerJ. 2023 Mar 8:11:e14793. doi: 10.7717/peerj.14793. eCollection 2023.

Authors

Matthew L Gimmel¹, M Andrew Johnston², Michael S Caterino³

Affiliations

¹ Department of Invertebrate Zoology, Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History, Santa Barbara, California, United States.
² Biodiversity Knowledge Integration Center, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona, United States.
³ Department of Plant & Environmental Sciences, Clemson University, Clemson, South Carolina, United States.

Abstract

The beetle fauna of the California Channel Islands is here enumerated for the first time in over 120 years. We provide an annotated checklist documenting species-by-island diversity from an exhaustive literature review and analysis of a compiled dataset of 26,609 digitized specimen records to which were added over 3,000 individual specimen determinations. We report 825 unique species from 514 genera and 71 families (including 17 new family records) comprising 1,829 species-by-island records. Species totals for each island are as follows: Anacapa (74); San Clemente (197); San Miguel (138); San Nicolas (146); Santa Barbara (64); Santa Catalina (370); Santa Cruz (503); and Santa Rosa (337). This represents the largest list of species published to date for any taxonomic group of animals on the Channel Islands; despite this, we consider the checklist to be preliminary. We present evidence that both inventory and taxonomic efforts on Channel Islands beetles are far from complete. Rarefaction estimates indicate there are at least several hundred more species of beetles yet to be recorded from the islands. Despite the incomplete nature of existing records, we found that species diversity is highly correlated with island area. We report 56 species which are putatively geographically restricted (endemic) to the Channel Islands, with two additional species of questionable endemic status. We also report 52 species from the islands which do not natively occur in the southern California region.

Keywords: Biodiversity informatics; Conservation; Endemism; Faunistics; Island biogeography; Nomenclature; Taxonomy.

Publication types

Review
Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

Animals
California
Channel Islands
Checklist
Coleoptera*
Porifera*

Grants and funding

This project was supported by The Nature Conservancy grant number 02052021-14766 (Channel Islands Beetle Diversity & Distribution) to Matthew L. Gimmel and M. Andrew Johnston. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.