Epsilon Archive for Student Projects

Abstract

During the past 50 years there has been substantial changes in land use due to the agricultural industrialization. These changes in land use have affected habitats connected to them. In many cases this affects the organisms living in these habitats. This study has assembled old and new data of land use and the range of butterfly species with a 50-year period in Sweden. The purpose was to investigate if there is a connection between change of land use and the change of butterfly species range on county scale in Sweden. A comparison of fifteen species of butterflies divided into three groups (generalist species, forest species and specialized species) was conducted to see if there is a difference in how the changes in land use have affected the different groups. Overall the farmland had decreased in all the counties and of the total 112 butterfly species, 40 had disappeared from at least one county. No significant relationship could be found between the change of land use and the change of butterfly species range. However, there was a difference between the division of three ecological groups: generalists, forest species and specialists. The results of this study suggest that specialized species have declined more during the past fifty years than generalist species, results that concur with other studies.