Butterfly monitoring in Romania
present in the Mozaic project area.
(Wikimedia Commons, A. Richter)
As part of EFNCP's collaboration with Butterfly Conservation Europe (BCE), we are taking some small steps towards establishing local butterfly monitoring in certain regions, one of which is Romania.
The aim is to produce data over several years that will feed into the BCE butterfly monitoring at European level, and thus into EEA data.
To this end, a training workshop was held in 2012 in southern Transylvania by Butterfly Conservation Europe and Leuphana University, with financial support from EFNCP/DG Environment. A report of the workshop can be downloaded here. The recent BCE manual on butterfly monitoring has also been translated into Romanian.
Photo of workshop participants
Developing butterflies as indicators in Europe: current situation and future options
Butterfly monitoring makes it possible to assess the trends of butterfly populations and to track population changes on a range of spatial scales: local, regional, national, or European. National and regional trends are especially valuable as they can be used as indicators of biodiversity and environmental change. As butterflies are good biological indicators, they are a valuable way of monitoring progress towards the EU target of halting the loss of biodiversity and degradation of ecosystem services in the EU by 2020. The monitoring is based on standard methods that can be used in the field (Van Swaay et al, 2012).
This report explains the current situation with regard to butterfly monitoring in Europe and gives recommendations as to how it could be developed.
