Photo observations of flowers potentially available to and observed with Chauliognathus marginatus and Chauliognathus pensylvanicus from iNaturalist.org

Digital specimens collected by community members are a largely untapped source of entomological data. By mining data from photo observations uploaded to online community data repositories, researchers can utilize this wealth of information to address questions about predator-prey interactions, phenotypic variation within species, plant-pollinator interactions, and a host of other topics. We mined data from photo observations on the community science website iNaturalist to investigate patterns in host plant availability and affiliation by two species of soldier beetles, Chauliognathus marginatus (Fabricius, 1775) and Chauliognathus pensylvanicus (De Geer, 1774). This dataset contains photo observations of these two species of beetles on flowering plants throughout the eastern United States from 2000-2019. It also contains photo observations of flowering plants potentially available to these two species, or blooming across their range during their seasonal periods of activity, in 2018.