CHAPTER 1An introduction to the Lepidoptera Iranica project

© Staatliches Museum für Naturkunde Stuttgart Up-to-date checklists of living organisms are an essential and inescapable tool for research, habitat management and conservation, pest control and biodiversity monitoring. However, such organized and trustable baseline data are missing for many groups of animals in Iran, including Lepi doptera (butterflies and moths). Several lists published in the past have contributed to our understanding of Iranian Lepidoptera (e.g., RotHscHild 1921; sutton 1963; BaRou 1967; HasHemi 1966; miRzayans & Kalali 1970; modaRRes awal 1994, 1997, 2012; nazaRi 2003; nadeRi 2012; KoçaK & Kemal 2014; tsHiKolovets et al. 2014). However, most of these checklists covered either a narrow geographic range (e.g., RotHscHild 1921; Kalali 1976) or only few taxo nomic groups (e.g., ecKweileR & Hofmann 1980; nazaRi 2003), or suffered from a limited examination of collections (e.g., BaRou 1967; miRzayans & Kalali 1970). The only published list with national scope and broader taxonomic (at the order level) coverage, published by KoçaK & Kemal (2014), is unfortunately full of errors and misleading data, suffers from structural problems and is useless for most purposes (see last section of Rajaei et al. 2023b). Unfortunately, due to a lack of sufficiently trained lepi dopterists in Iran, to the low number of amateur lepidopterists and collectors and to the extremely low number of research collections and active projects in Iran, a large part of the Lepidoptera fauna of the country is estimated as still undiscovered (see landRy et al. 2023). The only well-organized research initiative, “Association Lepidoptera Iranica” or A.L.I., which started in 2004, laid the foundations for boosting and centralizing lepidopterological activities in the country (see Rajaei et al. 2023b). During the course of three A.L.I. symposiums in Karlsruhe and Tehran, a large number of lepidopterists from around the world focused their efforts on the identification of Iranian Lepidoptera for a few years. However, the A.L.I. initiative did not receive enough attention in Iran and ended too soon, after just three years. The present catalogue is the first modern catalogue of Iranian Lepidoptera with national coverage for the whole order. In it, we tried to combine all presently-known phylogenetic, systematic, taxonomic, nomenclatural and geographic information on the Lepidoptera of Iran. Our main target was to present the data in a useful, easy-to-use and compact format.