The Odonata of Quebec: Specimen data from seven collections.

Quebec hosts multiple entomological specimen depositories, including seven publicly-accessible research collections. One of these, the University of Montreal's Ouellet-Robert Entomological Collection, houses an exceptionally large collection of Odonata. An initial specimen data capture project for this collection gathered 31,595 Quebec Odonata occurrence records, but several Quebec species were missing and geographic coverage was biased towards the Montreal region. To complement this dataset, we undertook to digitise the Odonata records of six other public research collections. They are, in order of Quebec Odonata collection size, the Laval University Entomological Collection, McGill University's Lyman Entomological Museum, the Insectarium of Montreal Research Collection, the Quebec Government's Insect Collection, Bishop's University's Insect Collection and the Laurentian Forestry Centre's René-Martineau Insectarium. Of the 40,447 total specimen occurrence records, 36,951 are identified to the species level, including 137 of the 150 species officially-recorded in Quebec and 2 non-nominotypical subspecies. We here summarise the data and highlight the strengths and weaknesses of the datasets. The complete dataset is available with this publication (Suppl. material 1), whereas the specimen data associated with each collection are available as Darwin Core archives at Canadensys.net and will be updated as appropriate.