More than twenty years have passed since the publication of the Checklist of beetles of Canada and Alaska (Bousquet 1991). During that period many changes have been introduced into the classification of Coleoptera. For example, the scydmaenines, pselaphines, scaphidiines, and micropeplines, which were usually regarded as distinct families, are now part of the Staphylinidae, the lyctines are included in the Bostrichidae, the anobiines in the Ptinidae, the languriines in the Erotylidae, the bruchines in the Chrysomelidae, the apionines and ithycerines in the Brentidae, and the scolytines and platypodines in the Curculionidae. On the other hand, a number of family-group taxa, usually treated as subfamilies, are now considered distinct families. This is the case for the geotrupines, trogines, glaresines, ochodaeines, and the glaphyrines in the superfamily Scarabaeoidea, the silvanines, passandrines, laemophloeines, and kateretines in the Cucujoidea, and the megalopodines and orsodacnines in the Chrysomeloidea. This period also saw the publication of numerous revisions of genus-group and family-group taxa, frequently accompanied by phylogenetic analyses, which have often drastically changed our understanding of the classification of these taxa. Three volumes of the series The Insects and Arachnids of Canada have been issued, one dealing with the superfamily Curculionoidea (excluding the Curculionidae) (Bright 1993), one on the Histeridae (Bousquet and Laplante 2006) and one on the Curculionidae subfamily Entiminae (Bright and Bouchard 2008). Finally many Canadian provincial and territorial records have been published in the last twenty years. These represent both new introductions as well as increases in our knowledge of native species distributions largely through increased collection efforts. This is particularly true for the Maritimes, thanks to the effort of Christopher Majka and Reginald Webster. Considering the amount of new information available, we believe that a new edition of the Checklist of beetles of Canada and Alaska will help those interested in beetles of the Canadian fauna.

As for the first edition of the Checklist, this publication is intended to provide the correct names of the beetles that occur in Canada and Alaska, give a brief survey of the distribution of the species in the area covered, and lead the users to useful publications for the identification of the taxa.

The classification of family-group taxa used in this checklist follows Bouchard et al. (2011). The listing of these names is phylogenetic for the superfamilies, families, and subfamilies, starting with what is considered the most basal-grade taxa, and alphabetic for the supertribes, tribes, and subtribes. Genus-group and species-group taxa and invalid synonyms are listed alphabetically. Synonyms are not listed unless the names were considered as valid taxa in the first edition of the Checklist, or the taxa were described after the publication of the first edition of the Checklist and reported from Canada and/or neighboring states, or the names have been used in recent important works dealing with the Nearctic fauna.

The authors of all scientific names are listed along with the date of publication of the taxa. To avoid confusion, initials are included for several authors, such as H.P. Brown, W.J. Brown, H. Clark, W.E. Clark, G. Dellacasa, M. Dellacasa, D.C. Miller, K.B. Miller, W.V. Miller, P.W.J. Müller, O.F. Müller, C.R. Sahlberg, R.F. Sahlberg, J.R. Sahlberg, C. Schaeffer, J.C. Schaeffer, E.H. Smith, J.B. Smith, R.F. Smith, S.G. Smith, C.G. Thomson, J. Thomson, A. Zimmermann, C.C.A. Zimmermann as well as W. Horn, and J.E. LeConte. LeConte and Horn stand for J.L. LeConte and G. Horn respectively.

An asterisk [*] placed after a species-group name indicates that the taxon is Holarctic, a dagger [†] that it is adventive in North America, and a double dagger [‡] that its status is uncertain and the taxon could be Holarctic or adventive on this continent. Species that have been intercepted at ports of entry but are not established in Canada or Alaska are not included in the list.

References to species identification keys are listed under the corresponding supraspecific taxa in the data archive. Only references including keys useful for the determination of all or most Canadian taxa of the group treated are considered. Keys published before the 1930s are usually out-of-date and most are omitted. References to generic keys are omitted since such keys are included in the two volumes of American Beetles (Arnett and Thomas 2000; Arnett et al. 2002).

An abbreviation of two letters is used to indicate records for the Canadian provinces and territories and for Alaska (see section “Abbreviations”). Labrador is considered a distinct geographic entity. The distributional records are based mostly on published records and on specimens in the Canadian National Collection of Insects, Arachnids and Nematodes, in Ottawa although other Canadian and Alaskan collections were surveyed for some groups. Only records considered to be reliable are listed. The absence of a geographic entry after a species-group name indicates that the taxon was recorded from Canada but no province was specified.

All extant described species in the order Coleoptera known to occur in Canada and Alaska are included. For a summary of the number of species recorded in each beetle family see Table 1.

This checklist includes records from all provinces and territories of Canada as well as the American state of Alaska.

1758–2013.

Object name: Darwin Core Archive Checklist of the beetles (Coleoptera) of Canada and Alaska. Second edition

Character encoding: UTF-8

Format name: Darwin Core Archive format

Format version: 1.0

Distribution: https://doi.org/10.5886/998dbs2a

Publication date of the data: 2013-12-06

Language: English

Licence of use: Open Government License – Canada, version 2.0 (http://data.gc.ca/eng/open-government-licence-canada#)

Metadata language: English

Date of metadata creation: 2013-09-06

Hierarchy level: Dataset

A book which includes a formatted version of the checklist, as well as an index to supraspecific taxa, is also available from Pensoft Publishers.