With support from „Butterfly Conservation Europe – EIG“ and hard work from our software developer (Nenad) we now have functional database for monitoring of butterflies in Serbia, named Larissa.
We ask for your support in counting butterflies along transects. Let us know if experiance any problems, send your suggestions and bugs that you have discovered while using the database. If you like to join in monitoring, first step would be reading guidelines for butterfly monitoring, which is also available in Serbian language. Aside this, we have prepared short and simple guideline for using our new database (in Serbian for now).
Monitoring requires regular visiting of a certain path (ideally once in a week) and counting butterflies along this path. If you take a regular walks somewhere, sometimes you might wont to take a look at the butterflies that flies there. Pick a short path (few hundred meters), split the path into smaller sections by habitat type that you encounter and watch for the butterflies.
Our aim is to have many people included in monitoring to ger good data about population trends in Serbia. It will help assessing butterfly threat status in the future and insure adequate conservation measures for their protection. The data will be used in Serbia, but will also be submitted to our partners. West European countries have tenths of thousands volunteers that send their data from the field on a regular basis, while the data from Eastern Europe does not exist. It is our great pleasure to be among the first ones and we hope to get your support.