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 book investigates the biogeography of butterfly species over the British islands, particularly the factors that influence their presence on the islands and that have made each island's butterfly fauna distinctive. It contains a full log of records of species on the islands and much supporting...

This chapter provides an introduction to modern concepts in island biogeography, factors that affect the presence of butterflies, and other organisms, on British and Irish islands. Colonization ability and migration capacity correlate with one another - to be good (bad) at one is often to be good...

In early investigations of island biogeography, species were seen very much as binary units, each undifferentiated (equivalent) in status. As research has progressed, it has become increasingly evident that each species has unique attributes that affect its probability of colonizing an island and...

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...

Even if changes (oscillations, trends) are almost certain to occur, there is still stability in an island's fauna, including butterflies. There is some stability (a dynamic equilibrium) in species richness balanced by turnover in relationship to mainland source numbers, island area and isolation....

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...

The current review confirms the findings of the original work (Dennis and Shreeve, 1996), particularly the ability of species to reach (transfer to) islands and the importance of mainland and larger island source populations for the persistence of species on smaller offshore islands. Knowledge...