Curated occurrence records for native millipedes in Tasmania, Australia

Tasmania is the smallest of the eight continental Australian States and Territories, with a landmass of ca 68000 sq. km. In comparison to the rest of Australia, Tasmania's millipede fauna is relatively well-sampled and well-studied, and includes 135 formally described native species in five orders: Polyxenida (5 species), Sphaerotheriida (2), Spirostreptida (21), Chordeumatida (11) and Polydesmida (96). Another 84 species (Polyzoniida 7, Polydesmida 76, Chordeumatida 1) have been sorted to morphospecies but not yet described.There is currently no complete, publicly available compilation of occurrence records for both described and undescribed Tasmanian millipedes. I privately maintain a dataset of this kind for generating distribution maps on the "Tasmanian Millipedes" website (https://www.datafix.com.au/tasmanian_millipedes/). In 2018 I shared more than 7000 records for named, native species in Tasmania with the Atlas of Living Australia (https://collections.ala.org.au/public/showDataResource/dr444), but the ALA resource has not been updated since 2019 and does not include either undescribed species occurrences or the large number of newer records for named species.

This paper describes a public version in Darwin Core format of 10073 curated occurrence records for native Tasmanian millipedes, and seven records for three Polydesmida species native to the Australian mainland which have been introduced to Tasmania. The dataset does not include records for introduced European Julida and Polydesmida. Some other exclusions are noted in the General description section, below.