This book provides a brief overview of the fast developing research on the butterflies of the islands over the past 20 years. The first three chapters introduce basic topics in island biogeography, past environments and aspects of butterfly biology and study. Chapters 4 to 6 drop down in scale from ...

This chapter considers the unusual nature of the British and Irish butterfly fauna and illustrate, even for such relatively small islands, how environmental gradients have affected their ranges, distributions and changes in geography over very short periods of time.

In this chapter, as a first step, a brief overview of all European islands is presented. These present an island biogeography context for the butterfly faunas of the British mainland and Ireland, the two micro-continents, which act as key sources of species for the host of surrounding satellite...

An important issue emerging in more recent years is that to understand the presence of species on islands, greater attention needs to be paid to species life histories and ecology: measures of island geography, in themselves, provide valuable but insufficient predictors of the occurrence of...

At the outset of Chapter 7, it was mentioned that populations of species (such as butterflies) are subject to perpetual changes in their environments caused by fluctuations and trends in conditions. This chapter considers the impacts of these changes over a longer time scale: such changes in...