Join the flight! Monitoring of urban and metropolitan butterflies resumes

Small, fragile, and colorful, butterflies are much more than just captivating insects in our parks and gardens: they are key bioindicators of the health of urban biodiversity. In recent years, dozens of volunteers have demonstrated that scientific research can also be conducted in the city's streets and green spaces by participating in the censuses of the urban Butterfly Monitoring Scheme (uBMS ) and the metropolitan Butterfly Monitoring Scheme (mBMS). Now, with the start of a new campaign, these projects are once again calling on citizens to contribute their perspectives and knowledge to the service of science and nature.

The volunteers at these observatories identify and count butterflies. They regularly monitor parks, beaches, and riverbanks using a standardized methodology to determine the number of butterfly species and their abundance along a designated route. Throughout the campaign, which runs from March to November, the volunteer walks the same transect in a metropolitan city or town every week or two, supported by a research team.
In March alone, over 30 different species of diurnal butterflies can be found in the parks, gardens, beaches, and urban riverside areas of Barcelona and its metropolitan area. Although some are extremely difficult to spot, the field notes compiled by volunteers list more than 50 different butterfly species that can be seen throughout the year in these locations.

Although most volunteers collaborate altruistically and driven by strong motivation, we at CREAF's citizen science department believe it's essential to provide them with direct support. Firstly, these projects offer training through various butterfly identification and handling courses for those involved. Secondly, an annual event is organized each year to present the results obtained during the campaign, create a space for volunteers to meet and share experiences, and introduce them to the research and public management team behind the projects.

Participating in a citizen science project inherently involves contributing to scientific studies. Butterfly observatories are no exception, and the data collected by their volunteers helps explain how urban butterflies differ from those in natural environments, detect previously unknown species in metropolitan parks, and study how drought affects these insects.

Furthermore, the public administrations that finance the two observatories -Barcelona City Council and Barcelona Metropolitan Area- use the data generated by the projects to evaluate the effectiveness of the urban green space management they carry out and try to improve the biodiversity that these spaces can accommodate.