Since its birth, citizen science has yielded enormous benefits for scientific research, contributing to the collection of relevant information for the scientific community and the dissemination of helpful and informative content on crucial issues such as pollution and climate change. This tool has grown exponentially over the last decade, proving extremely useful in addressing the challenges facing conservation biology today.
Italy is famed for its great biodiversity. It is, in fact, one of the richest European nations in terms of animal and plant species. The number of butterfly species is particularly high: with almost 300 native species, Italy is the second Mediterranean country in terms of species richness, second only to Turkey.
Climate change is causing huge upheavals in the distribution of many animal species, and mountaintop populations are particularly vulnerable in this respect. They usually respond to rising temperatures with altitudinal shifts, which result in an obvious shrinkage of territory and are by definition limited by the height of the mountain range.
Endemism is the phenomenon whereby certain plant or animal species are exclusive to a given territory. Although, technically, the term endemism can also be applied to vast territories, such as entire continents, endemisms relating to very restricted areas such as islands, sometimes covering only a few square kilometres, are of interest.
