GENERAL INTRODUCTION

specimens could be reliably identified alive in the field or from digital photographs with the help from a specialist (Dr. I.J. Kitching, Natural History Museum, London). This has not only the ethical advantage that not many specimens had to be killed (but see Holloway et al. 2001, McKenna et al. 2001 for the relatively small impact of scientific collecting an natural moth populations), but also reduced the necessity to export specimens for further determination, which is a sensitive issue in many developing countries due to fears of unilateral bioprospecting (Castree 2003, Makhubu 1998). Species nomenclature in this study mostly follows the Checklist of Kitching & Cadiou (2000), together with some more recent species descriptions. However, other recently described species were not considered valid and therefore ignored even though they are not (yet) formally rejected. Similarly, in a few cases revised species boundaries were adopted, which are based an preliminary studies of which publication is pending. Four undescribed specimens and one subspecies which will soon be raised to species status (I.J. Kitching pers. com.) were also included into analyses although formal descriptions are pending.

1.3 Retrieving and processing information for macroecological research Macroecological analyses have frequently been conducted an already existing, comprehensive data sets which List parameters like body size, local abundance estimates and geographical distributions of taxa (e.g. Johnson 1998b, Blackburn et al. 2004, Gaston & Blackburn 1996). With the exception of a few thoroughly listed data Sets (e.g. BirdLife International/European Bird Census 2000), such information often exists in the form of atlases for taxa of public (i.e. birds, mammals & butterflies) or commercial interest (e.g. timber trees). The main reason for the bias against the study of various relationships in tropical insects (e.g. Gaston 1996a) is because such data are mostly not available (see also Blackburn & Gaston 1998), at least not in a ready-to-use form. However, much of the needed information might actually be there, only scattered over various collections or publications and in strikingly different forms, depending an why the data was originally sampled (see also O'Connell et al. 2004). The increasing use of the Internet is a chance to retrieve such treasures and make them widely accessible for analysis. Here an example of retrieving distribution information for Southeast-Asian hawkmoths is outlined, focussing an major methodological issues rather than an results (which can be found in other chapters).

Collaborations
The necessary data for comprehensive ringe analyses can never be sampled by a single person (or research group) in a `normal' 3-6 year research project. Thus, besides scanning the relevant literature (which often involves non-peer-reviewed, local magazines as well as various internet resources), collaboration with institutional and private collections is the most efficient way to access data. In this project, collaboration with Dr. Jan J. Kitching gave access to data from the British Museum of Natural History (London) and the Carnegie Museum (Pittsburgh), covering extensive collection material of more than 150 years as well as a data bank of published distribution records. While there is certainly an element of luck in finding