Despite the care taken in the abstract and discussion to highlight: "Findings are correlative rather than causal" and "evidence is required to determine if neonicotinoids are directly responsible for declines in national butterfly populations or are acting as a proxy for other factors associated with agricultural intensification", the authors seem to make a bold (and somewhat questionable) asserti...

On the basis of clarification with the authors, this question has been updated. My original concern related to spatial patterns in butterfly abundance being related to levels neonicotinoid application, whilst other spatial variables (such as area of intensive arable agriculture) were ignored. This misunderstanding was due to some ambiguity in the data description section “This dataset contains cou...