The phylogenetic relationships of the subgenera Polyommatus and Plebicula, within the Palaearctic butterfly genus Polyommatus, were inferred from a combined analysis of the nuclear marker ITS2 and the barcoding section of the mitochondrial gene COI. Eight major clades were recovered within Polyommatus s. l., which correspond closely to subgenera based on traditional systematics and are of late Pliocene to early Pleistocene origin. Extraordinary chromosomal evolution occurred independently in three of these clades. The disputed position of several species formerly placed in the subgenus Plebicula is clarified. A group of Central Asian species (Bryna) was recovered as a monophyletic clade within Polyommatus s. str. The Kurdistanian endemic P. buzulmavi appears as a sister species to P. icarus. P. celina replaces P. icarus in NW Africa and the Canary Islands, and split from the last common ancestor with P. icarus back in the early Pleistocene.
Invertebrate diversity has rapidly declined throughout Europe during the last century. Various reasons for this decrease have been proposed including human induced factors like climate change. Temperature changes alter distributions and occurrences of butterflies by determining habitat conditions at different scales. We evaluated changes in the composition of butterfly communities recorded at nine areas of fallow ground in south-western Germany in 1973, 1986, 2010 and 2012 using Pollard’s transect technique. To demonstrate the importance of climatic changes in affecting butterfly communities, we calculated the community temperature index (CTI) for each butterfly community in each year. Although they increased slightly, the CTI-values did not match the temperature trends recorded in the study region. However, the reduction in the standard deviations of the CTIs over time is reflected in the marked loss of cold- and warm-adapted species due to their inability to cope with temperature and land-use induced habitat changes. Results of our butterfly surveys indicate a marked decline in species richness and striking changes in the composition of the butterfly communities studied. This trend was most pronounced for habitat specialists, thus mirroring a depletion in trait diversity. Our results indicate that, in the course of large-scale anthropogenic changes, habitat degradation at smaller scales will continuously lead to the replacement of habitat specialists by ubiquitous species., Katharina J. Filz ... [et al.]., and Obsahuje seznam literatury