Butterfly Conservation

Living room conservation: Gaming & virtual reality for insect and ecosystem conservation

Gaming and virtual reality could bridge the gap between urban societies and nature, thereby paving the way to insect conservation by the means of education and participation. This is what an interdisciplinary team at Florida International University strive to achieve by developing a virtual reality game (desktop version also available) dedicated to insect and plant species. Focused on imperiled butterflies, their innovative idea: Butterfly World 1.0, is described in the open-access journal Rethinking Ecology.

Participant playing the virtual reality version of Butterfly World 1.0.
Photo by Jaeson Clayborn.

Players explore and search for butterflies using knowledge gained through gameplay

Gaming and virtual reality (VR) could bridge the gap between urban societies and nature, thereby paving the way to insect conservation by the means of education, curiosity and life-like participation.

This is what Florida International University‘s team of computer scientist Alban Delamarre and biologist Dr Jaeson Clayborn strive to achieve by developing a VR game (desktop version also available) dedicated to insect and plant species. Focused on imperiled butterflies, their innovative idea: Butterfly World 1.0, is described in the open-access journal Rethinking Ecology.

When playing, information about each butterfly species is accessed on the player’s game tablet. Image by
Alban Delamarre and Dr Jaeson Clayborn.

Butterfly World 1.0 is an adventure game designed to engage its users in simulated exploration and education. Set in the subtropical dry forest of the Florida Keys (an archipelago situated off the southern coast of Florida, USA), Butterfly World draws the players into an immersive virtual environment where they learn about relationships between butterflies, plants, and invasive species. While exploring the set, they interact with and learn about the federally endangered Schaus’ swallowtail butterfly, the invasive graceful twig ant, native and exotic plants, and several other butterflies inhabiting the dry forest ecosystem. Other nature-related VR experiences, including conservation awareness and educational programs, rely on passive observations with minimal direct interactions between participants and the virtual environment.

According to the authors, virtual reality and serious gaming are “the new frontiers in environmental education” and “present a unique opportunity to interact with and learn about different species and ecosystems”.

In the real world, Spanish needles (Bidens alba) is considered a weed in South Florida. However, it is an excellent nectar source for butterflies.
Photo by Alban Delamarre.

The major advantage is that this type of interactive, computer-generated experience allows for people to observe phenomena otherwise impossible or difficult to witness, such as forest succession over long periods of time, rare butterflies in tropical dry forests, or the effects of invasive species against native wildlife.

“Imagine if, instead of opening a textbook, students could open their eyes to a virtual world. We live in a time where experiential learning and stories about different species matter, because how we feel about and connect with these species will determine their continued existence in the present and future. While technology cannot replace actual exposure to the environment, it can provide similar, near-realistic experiences when appropriately implemented,” say the scientists.

In conclusion, Delamarre and Clayborn note that the purpose of Butterfly World is to build knowledge, reawaken latent curiosity, and cultivate empathy for insect and ecosystem conservation.

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The game is accessible online at: http://ocelot.aul.fiu.edu/~adela177/ButterflyWorld/.

Original source:

Clayborn J, Delamarre A (2019) Living room conservation: a virtual way to engage participants in insect conservation. Rethinking Ecology 4: 31-43. https://doi.org/10.3897/rethinkingecology.4.32763

Being systematic about the unknown: Grid-based schemes could improve butterfly monitoring

Butterfly monitoring schemes are at the heart of citizen science, with the general public and researchers collaborating to discover how butterfly populations change over time. To develop the concept further, a new paper in the journal Nature Conservation shows how systematically placed, grid-based transects can help schemes by reducing habitat bias.

Rapidly increasing in number and popularity, Butterfly Monitoring Schemes have proved to be a method generating important, high-resolution data. Reliant on enthusiastic volunteers, who record butterflies along freely chosen transects, the collected observations are then used to explore and understand trends in butterfly numbers and distributions.

However, there is a risk associated with free site selection: some habitats can become underrepresented and monitoring results therefore less general than intended.

Butterfly hot-spots, such as semi-natural grasslands, tend to be favoured over less well-known environments. This means that butterflies living in other ‘less popular’ habitats, such as forests and wetlands, are covered less thoroughly and population declines of these species risk going undetected.

A team of Swedish researchers have now investigated the potential of a new, complimentary grid-based design, where butterfly recorders are to walk systematically placed transects across the country.

The results of testing the new method showed that butterflies were abundant in traditionally overlooked habitats such as coniferous forests, bogs, and clear-cuts. Additionally, the systematic transects also performed well in avoiding habitat bias.

“Butterfly Monitoring Schemes are likely to benefit from adding grid-based butterfly transects as a complement to free site choice designs,” explains Dr. Lars B. Pettersson from Lund University. “Free and systematic site selection should not be seen as mutually exclusive, instead they can be used together to ensure high quality and inclusiveness of data for better assessing of future biodiversity trends.”

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Additional information:

This work has been carried out within the EU project STEP (FP7 grant 244090-STEP-CP-FP) and the Swedish Butterfly Monitoring Scheme (Swedish EPA contract 2227-13-003). It is part of the strategic research area Biodiversity and Ecosystems in a Changing Climate, BECC.

Rare Amazonian butterfly named after British national treasure Sir David Attenborough

A beautiful new Black-eyed Satyr species has become the first butterfly named in honour of the popular naturalist and TV presenter Sir David Attenborough. Although not the first animal to be named after the British national treasure, the butterfly is so rare that it is known only from lowland tropical forests of the upper Amazon basin in Venezuela, Colombia, and Brazil. The study, conducted by an international team of researchers, led by Andrew F. E. Neild, Natural History Museum, London, and Shinichi Nakahara, McGuire Center for Lepidoptera and Biodiversity and Entomology & Nematology Department, University of Florida, is published in the open-access journal ZooKeys.

The presently described Attenborough’s Black-eyed Satyr, scientifically called Euptychia attenboroughi, has such a restricted distribution that all of its known sites lie within 500 kilometres from each other in the north-west of the upper Amazon basin.

Best known for scripting and presenting the BBC Natural History’s ‘Life’ series, Sir David Attenborough is also a multiple winner of the BAFTA award and a president of Butterfly Conservation.

“Other animals and plants have previously been dedicated to Sir David, but it makes us happy and proud to be the first to dedicate a butterfly species in his name,” says Andrew Neild. “Although we are a large team from several countries from across four continents and speaking different languages, we have all been deeply influenced and inspired by Sir David’s fascinating and informative documentaries.”

The butterfly’s atypical wings in comparison to its relatives, have been the reason the scientists took to plenty of diagnostic characters to define its taxonomic placement. The peculiar patterns and morphology initially led the researchers to think the species could be even a new genus.

“It was a surprise for us that DNA data supported inclusion of this new species in the existing genus Euptychia, since this species lacked a distinctive structural character which was considered to be shared by all members of the genus” explains Shinichi Nakahara.

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Original Source:

Neild AFE, Nakahara S, Zacca T, Fratello S, Lamas G, Le Crom J-F, Dolibaina DR, Dias FMS, Casagrande MM, Mielke OHH, Espeland M (2015) Two new species of Euptychia Hübner, 1818 from the upper Amazon basin (Lepidoptera, Nymphalidae, Satyrinae). ZooKeys 541: 87-108. doi: 10.3897/zookeys.541.6297