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Butterflies of Croatia: the state of knowledge

In the last decade, our goal has been to create a national database of distributional records in Croatia and publish a national checklist of butterflies. At this point the records include published papers, collection data, as well as unpublished records (e.g. Lorković diaries, fieldwork data) from three centuries. Even though sampling has been sporadic and uneven, with some areas receiving more attention than others, we managed to assess the threat status of the butterfly fauna and this was published in the Red Book of threatened butterflies of Croatia. About 25% of Croatia’s butterfly fauna is of conservation concern. The main causes of the decline are thought to be changes in rural land use, especially land abandonment and agricultural intensification because of demographic changes and economic transition. The main objective of the Lepidoptera working group (formed as part of the EU Natura 2000 Integration Project – NIP) has been to gather new distributional data and use this information for establishing of future species monitoring schemes. The progress that the group has recently made resulted in much new insight. The level of knowledge has been increased considerably but information on trends in population dynamics of many species is still lacking. Future monitoring plans will help us to understand impact of the environmental change, particularly how climate change and habitat loss are affecting our wildlife.

EU Natura 2000 Integration Project ; monitoring, conservation

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