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Butterfly communities

Many butterflies dependent on specific habitat structures and resources (specific caterpillar food plants and nectar resources). Thus, butterflies represent excellent model organisms to study changes in nature. In this working package, the team recorded butterfly communities inside the church forest, forest margin, plantations, shrubland and agricultural land - along 40 established line transects. Based on these data it will be possible to evaluate the value of church forests for typical forest butterfly species. This working package was mainly supervised by Thomas Schmitt (SEI), in collaboration with Jan C. Habel (University of Salzburg), Egzaber Hailay. The following students were involved here: Eva Benkhoff, Timon Ameis and Johanna Eul