Abstract

We summarise the distribution of the two species of the genus Natrix occurring in Bulgaria, based on records from 147 peer-reviewed publications, grey literature, and data repositories, combined with unpublished data. This is the first extensive mapping for N. natrix; records fall in 560 cells of the 10-km MGRS/UTM grid, of which 102 cells (18.2%) were with published information we could not confirm with new data, 175 (31.2%) were with published and confirmed, and 283 (50.5%) were with new localities. For N. tessellata we increased the number of cells with records by 64% compared to the 2011 mapping, by identifying 445 cells with localities: 162 cells (36.4%) were previously published and unconfirmed, 152 (34.1%) were published and confirmed, and 131 (29.4%) were with new data. Gross climatic conditions for records with exact locations were assigned following the Köppen-Geiger classification; the distribution for both species does not seem to be highly correlated to climate as they were found in 9 of the 12 Köppen-Geiger classes present, only missing from the 3 classes that are limited to high elevations in Bulgaria and account for less than 1% of the area. The vertical distribution of the observations supports our knowledge that the species are most numerous at lower elevations (92.4% of records were <1000 m above sea level for N. natrix and 92.6% were <500 m for N. tessellata). Higher elevations and some lowlands remain relatively understudied and future sampling will likely reveal new localities for both species.

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