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Butterflies of Croatia

Recent activities of the Lepidoptera group working on the EU Natura 2000 Integration Project (NIP) were gathering new distribution data and setting up species monitoring on 124 sites across Croatia. The level of knowledge has raised considerably but we are still missing the information on the species trends as the project finished after two years. Nevertheless, future monitoring plans will help us to understand impacts of change ; particularly how habitat loss and climate change is affecting our butterflies. Different studies are going on to get additional data on several unstudied areas in Croatia and to fulfil the current database with new distribution records. Even the data collecting has been sporadic and uneven, with some areas receiving more attention than other does, the checklist of butterflies has been published and we managed to assess the species threat status and publish the Red Book of threatened butterflies. The results showed that about 25% of Croatia’s butterfly fauna is of conservation concern. The main causes of declines thought to be changes in rural land use, especially agricultural intensification on some areas and land abandonment due to demographic changes and economic transition on other. In 2017, we held a monitoring training for the employees of the protected areas and carried on few monitoring projects for Lycaena dispar and Phengaris spp. Also in 2017 we started a 5-year project of DNA barcoding of Croatian biodiversity (CroBarFauna) funded by the Croatian Science Foundation with primary goal of studying the amount and geographical distribution of the genetic diversity of selected animal groups including Lepidoptera by using DNA barcoding methodology, flagging species for further taxonomic, phylogenetic and phylogeographic studies. Establishment of national database of genetic biodiversity will contribute to the global level and enriching international data basis (BOLD and GenBank) with DNA barcodes of not yet represented taxa and taxa from this underrepresented geographic region.

EU Natura 2000 Integration Project ; CroBarFauna ; monitoring ; Lepidoptera

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