The ecology and conservation of butterflies and moths

Abstract

In 2011, we published the proceedings of Butterfly Conservation’s Sixth International Symposium ‘2010 and beyond for Lepidoptera’ (volume 15:1–365). That meeting attempted to assess whether the Convention on Biological Diversity’s aspiration to significantly reduce the rate of biodiversity loss in the Lepidoptera had been achieved. Sadly the conclusion was that it had not. Nevertheless, the papers in that Special Edition were not uniformly concerned with doom and gloom and many reported important insights into species’ ecology and approaches which could lead to improvements in the future. Now, 4 years on, we publish the written contributions to the Seventh Symposium held in April 2014. The Symposium title was deliberately less focussed than that held in 2010 to attempt to capture a broad snapshot of work on Lepidoptera from around the world—in that it was successful, with over 80 presentations from 28 countries. The Journal is proud to present 20 written papers from that intense and exhilarating 3-day long meeting. Nineteen papers are presented in this edition, one has already been published (Maes et al. 2014). Inevitably the preoccupation of many authors was with the ongoing impacts of climate change and how to overcome them. Parmesan et al. (2015) examined elevational range and hostplant shifts in the quino checkerspot Euphydryas editha quino whilst Wilson et al. (2015) examined turnover, habitat quality and microclimate changes at a contracting range margin of the Apollo Parnassius apollo in the Sierra de Guadarrama mountains of Spain. Indeed, microclimate was something of a theme: Curtis and Isaac (2015) examined the impact of microclimate heterogeneity on the Glanville fritillary Melitaea cinxia, Hindle et al. (2015) scrutinised the value of topographical variation to the marbled white butterfly Melanargia galathea, whilst Suggitt et al. (2015) studied the influence of microclimate in buffering the effects of climate change and contributing to landscape-scale persistence of butterflies and moths. Dispersal studies were also evident ranging from an investigation of threats to the scarce copper (Lycaena virgaureae) from development in Sweden (Haaland 2015) and the impact of altitude (Cassacci et al. 2015). Several papers were concerned with population trends (Swengel and Swengel 2015a, b; Curtis et al. 2015) including monitoring approaches (Roy et al. 2015) or conservation at very different spatial scales such as South Africa (Edge and Mecenero 2015) and the vineyards of Washington State in the USA (James et al. 2015). Autecological studies are always welcome; Edge and Bazin (2015) contributed an indepth study of the Knysna skolly Thestor brachycerus brachycerus, Celik et al. (2015) a paper on the habitat quality determinants for the false ringlet Coenonympha Oedipus, whilst Tjornlov et al. (2015) focussed on & John W. Dover J.W.Dover@staffs.ac.uk