For terrestrial plants, stomatal limitation of photosynthesis by drought results in higher uptake of 13C-CO2 by decreased isotopic descrimination. This leads to seasonal and inter-annual variations of C isotopic composition.
That is what I suspected. Thanks for the insight. How about H?
Would I need to get samples for isotopic analysis across entire us to have a non-biased data set for that given year we are sampling butterflies? Or would others' datasets suffice?