Counting butterflies in cities
Butterflies are good indicators of the quality of urban green spaces. Counting them can helps cities and urban planners evaluate the state of biodiversit...
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Communities For Biodiversity: Join Us in Counting Butterflies in Your City!
This summer, we are launching a citizen science campaign with the Greening Cities of UNP+, in which every city dweller is invited to go out and count butterflies in their local parks, gardens, urban meadows, vacant spaces or any other green space in the city.
Butterflies are not only beautiful - they are also great biodiversity indicators.
Each butterfly count gives an idea of the local state of biodiversity and habitat quality in the neighbourhood and city-wide. Put together, repeated observations over the next months and years will help policy makers and scientists evaluate the impact of urban nature plans on biodiversity and guide future actions for the city.
Put on your scientist hat and join us! Learn about butterflies and contribute to nature conservation in your city.
How do we do this?
For many years now, the two Lighthouse cities in UNP+ have had citizen observatories of butterflies:
- Paris: Opération papillons invites locals to monitor butterflies in their garden in cities but also everywhere else in France.
- Barcelona: the Citizen observatory of urban butterflies enrols volunteers to conduct high quality surveys in parks of Barcelona and Madrid since 2018.
In UNP+, we help other cities do the same. We adopt a standardised 15-minutes observation protocol (download here) developed with the European Butterfly Monitoring Scheme (eBMS). We focus on the three pilot greening cities of UNP+, but also support other cities wishing to join the effort, contributing to build a European network of urban butterfly observations.
Get the Butterfly count app and start observing butterflies around you!
It’s already happening…
In the Greening Cities:
Mannheim
As part of the local green deal project iDEAL Mannheim, the city has already launched its citizen science campaign in May 2024, in collaboration with the Vielfaltergarten initiative led by UFZ/iDiv.
Coordinator: Hannah [dot] Bolz [at] mannheim [dot] de (Hannah Bolz)
Belgrade - coming soon!
Coordinator: Maja Jovanovic - maja [dot] jovanovic [at] beograd [dot] gov [dot] rs (maja[dot]jovanovic[at]beograd[dot]gov[dot]rs)
Burgas - coming soon!
Coordinators:
Svilen Georgiev - Incubatorbs [at] abv [dot] bg (Incubatorbs[at]abv[dot]bg)
Ivelina Strateva - i [dot] strateva [at] burgas [dot] bg (i[dot]strateva[at]burgas[dot]bg)
In other cities:
Leipzig - Vielfaltergarten
Berlin - Das Bunte Flattern
Are you a city official? Join us and start your own citizen science butterfly observatory with our help!
Contact us:
guy [dot] peer [at] idiv [dot] de (Dr. Guy Pe’er) - Researcher (UFZ/iDiv)
aletta [dot] bonn [at] idiv [dot] de (Prof. Aletta Bonn) - Professor (UFZ/iDiv)
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