During the last two centuries, the Lepidoptera of Iran have mainly been investigated by European and Russian entomologists, with authors such as Ménétries, Lederer, Christoph, Pfeiffer, Brandt, Amsel, Ebert and others publishing large amounts of data from different localities around the country. Depending on the original language of the author, some of the visited localities were recorded with different spellings (e.g., Booshehr, Bouchir, Buschehr and Bushire for Bushehr), and finding such names on maps can be quite an elaborate process.

Fig. 1.

Map of Iran including names of province capitals and some important cities. Numbers refer to the most elusive Iranian localities found during the compilation of this catalogue.

Additionally, a number of cities and villages in the old literature have been renamed over time (e.g., Gorgan as the new name of Astarabad or Jiroft as the new name of Sabzewaran). Moreover, and in the absence of precise geographic coordinates, early entomologists simply obtained local names from the local people, writing down what they heard based on the local pronunciations. Some of these spellings are quite different from what is found on maps today (e.g., Comée for Komehr, Fars prov.). Sometimes, colloquial names absent on maps were given (e.g., Sineh Sefid in Fars prov., a mountain foot close to Dasht-e Arjan in W Shiraz). Pinpointing such localities on maps is sometimes extremely challenging, even for native Iranian researchers or tour guides.

During this project, we amassed a long list of such place names and georeferenced them. These localities are listed alphabetically in Appendix 1 together with all unique variants found in the literature. All localities were assigned geographic coordinates and assigned to their relative provinces. Extremely elusive localities or historically important sampling sites were assigned numbers (in parentheses), which were plotted on the map in Fig. 1. These numbers are plotted from northwest to southeast. An asterisk (*) marks cities or villages frequently referred to in the literature. An interactive version of the map is given in Supplementary Figure 1.

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