Maritimes Butterfly Atlas project taking flight

It's enough to set the hearts of butterfly researchers fluttering — they're getting more time to gather information on such butterflies as the early hairstreak and the eastern tailed blue.

Another season has been added to the Maritimes Butterfly Atlas project, documenting those species and others across the region. The results will be jointly published with information from the state of Maine, possibly in 2017 or 2018.

Since 2010, volunteers from across the Maritimes have been documenting the butterflies of the region by submitting specimens or pictures. About 25,000 submissions have been received with information on where and when butterflies were found and in what habitat they were found.

"Certainly it's more than exceeded our expectations when we launched the project," said John Klymko, the director of the atlas and a zoologist at the Atlantic Canada Conservation Data Centre in Sackville. "We're quite pleased with the level of participation."

Klymko says the information gathered so far has been entered into a database to document the distribution of butterflies across the Maritime provinces and they've decided to add another season for butterfly counting into the project.

"Over the six-year period of the butterfly atlas, we'll create a snapshot of our butterfly species and hopefully if the project can be repeated again in 20 years or 40 years, we'll be able to see and say with confidence that some of these distributions have changed — some butterflies have arrived that weren't here before and some butterflies may even disappear."

More than 350 volunteers have been involved in the Maritimes Butterfly Atlas project and Klymko says they have made some interesting discoveries. For instance, volunteers spotted the eastern tailed blue butterfly in southwestern areas of New Brunswick in the first year of the survey, but in the last two years that species has also been spotted in Nova Scotia, making it the first time the eastern tailed blue has been documented in that province.

Over the winter, Klymko was in contact with organizers in Maine who are working on a similar project and they decided to collaborate.

"We thought wouldn't it be great if we could collaborate our efforts and publish the results of the Maritimes Butterfly Atlas with the results of the Maine Butterfly Survey."

Klymko says Maine and the Maritimes share many of the same butterfly species.

"Pretty well every species we have here in the Maritimes also occurs in Maine. There are only two exceptions to that, the salt marsh copper and the Maritime ringlet."

Butterfly atlases have already been published in Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont.

"So there is going to be quite a large area in the northeast that has had a fairly thorough butterfly survey done in the past 15 or 20 years which will be quite valuable going forward," said Klymko.