Since 1968, the Australian Dung Beetle Project has carried out field releases of 43 deliberately introduced dung beetle species for the biological control of livestock dung and dung‐breeding pests. Of these, 23 species are known to have become established. For most of these species, sufficient time has elapsed for population expansion to fill the extent of their potential geographic range through both natural and human‐assisted dispersal. Consequently, over the last 20 years, extensive efforts have been made to quantify the current distribution of these introduced dung beetles, as well as the seasonal and spatial variation in their activity levels. Much of these data and their associated metadata have remained unpublished, and they have not previously been synthesized into a cohesive dataset. Here, we collate and report data from the three largest dung beetle monitoring projects from 2001 to 2022. Together, these projects encompass data collected from across Australia, and include records for all 23 species of established dung beetles introduced for biocontrol purposes. In total, these data include 22,718 presence records and 213,538 absence records collected during 10,272 sampling events at 546 locations. Most presence records (97%) include abundance data. In total, 1,752,807 dung beetles were identified as part of these data. The distributional occurrence and abundance data can be used to explore questions such as factors influencing dung beetle species distributions, dung beetle biocontrol, and insect‐mediated ecosystem services. These data are provided under a CC‐BY‐NC 4.0 license and users are encouraged to cite this data paper when using the data.

中文翻译：

---

澳大利亚故意引入粪甲虫：2001年至2022年12年的发生和丰度记录


自1968年以来，澳大利亚粪甲虫项目已对43种特意引进的粪甲虫进行了田间释放，用于对牲畜粪便和粪便繁殖害虫进行生物防治。其中，已知有 23 个物种已经定居。对于大多数这些物种来说，已经有足够的时间进行种群扩张，通过自然和人类辅助的扩散来填补其潜在的地理范围。因此，在过去 20 年里，人们做出了大量努力来量化这些引入的粪甲虫的当前分布及其活动水平的季节和空间变化。其中大部分数据及其相关元数据尚未发布，而且之前也没有被合成为一个有凝聚力的数据集。在这里，我们整理并报告了 2001 年至 2022 年三个最大粪甲虫监测项目的数据。这些项目涵盖了从澳大利亚各地收集的数据，并包括为生物防治目的引入的所有 23 种已建立的粪甲虫的记录。这些数据总共包括在 546 个地点的 10,272 次采样事件中收集的 22,718 条存在记录和 213,538 条缺勤记录。大多数存在记录 (97%) 都包含丰度数据。这些数据总共识别出 1,752,807 只粪甲虫。分布发生率和丰度数据可用于探讨影响粪甲虫物种分布的因素、粪甲虫生物防治和昆虫介导的生态系统服务等问题。这些数据是在 CC-BY-NC 4.0 许可下提供的，鼓励用户在使用这些数据时引用该数据论文。