Endangered Serbian Butterflies – Working Together

Project Animal(s) : Butterflies
Project Category : Insects
Project Region : Europe
Project Type : Conservation
Project URL : http://www.habiprot.org.rs/rsg2011/index_en.html
Project is timebound? : No

With the help of Rufford Small Grants, Serbia already assembled a great team working on butterfly conservation, mainly focused on citizen science initiatives. This project we’ll keep the team busy and growing through the largest butterfly survey in the country, allowing us to work together “in the field” and “on the web”.

We plan to perfect our software tools used for recording butterfly occurrences and trends (biologer.org and monitoring.habiprot.org.rs). Special field effort will be dedicated on two festoon butterflies (Zerynthia sp.) found together in eastern Serbia. Since eastern festoon has recently started to spread its range to the north, it would be interesting to look into ecological reasoning of this spread and predict future scenario. But the project also aims to improve the knowledge on the distribution of other threatened, protected and least known butterflies through targeted field surveys. Besides field surveys, the available literature will be digitalised. Finally all data will be to compile national Red List of butterflies, which is expected to set a long term priorities in species conservation and improve national legislative.

Project Agency : Habiprot

Project Researcher : Miloš Popović

Project Researcher Contact : mpopovic@pmf.ni.ac.rs