Britain and Ireland

The UK Butterflies website covers butterfly species from Great Britain (England, Scotland and Wales), Ireland, the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man.

Vice Counties

Species distribution is often described with reference to one or more vice counties, which are shown in the figure below. The concept of a vice county was introduced by Hewett Cottrell Watson who first used them in the third volume of his Cybele Britannica, published in 1852, based on the ancient counties of Great Britain (England, Scotland and Wales), although these were occasionally subdivided to create smaller, more uniform units. In 1901 Robert Lloyd Praeger introduced a similar system for Ireland. A vice county provides a stable basis for recording and remain unchanged by any government reorganisations, allowing historical and modern data to be more accurately compared.

Listings of all vice counties is given below (by name, and by number). The 112 vice counties in Great Britain (England, Scotland and Wales) has a name and a number. Vice county 38, abbreviated to "VC38", is called "Warwickshire". The Irish vice counties are numbered from H1 to H40 ("H" for "Hibernia"). Vice county (or VC) H3 is "West Cork".

Vice County Listing - by Name

Vice County Listing - by Number

Zoogeographical Regions

The world can be divided into the zoogeographical regions shown in the figure below. The divisions follow the World Wildlife Fund ecozones with the addition of an Arctic region that is occasionally used in Lepidoptera-related descriptions.

• Afrotropic. A region including Sub-Saharan Africa.
• Arctic. A region including the areas in and around the Arctic circle.
• Australasia. A region including Australia, New Guinea, New Zealand, and neighbouring islands. The northern boundary of this zone is known as the Wallace line.
• Holarctic. A term used to describe the combination of the Nearctic and Palearctic regions.
• Indomalaya. A region including the Indian subcontinent, Southeast Asia, and southern China.
• Nearctic. A region including most of North America.
• Neotropic. A region including South America, Central America, and the Caribbean.
• Palearctic. A region including the bulk of Europe, Asia and North Africa.