Welcome to the Malta BMS!
This window is for the information of the Maltese Butterfly Monitoring Scheme, BMS to monitor Maltese butterflies.
Be part of the eBMS community counting Butterflies!
Contact
Please, contact the coordinators before starting a transect, they can help you where to do your transect and give advice on butterfly monitoring.
If you would like to participate in monitoring butterflies in Malta, contact the coordinators: Prof. Louis F Cassar louis.f.cassar@um.edu.mt or to butterflymonitoring@um.edu.mt
Methodologies
The basic methodology for a BMS is the Transect, a fixed route that is visited frequently to count butterfly species present and their abundances. Thanks to this method of repetitive counts we count to determine the butterfly trends and their current status. Help us in the protection of butterflies doing a transect close to your house or working place like thousand of volunteers in Europe. See more information on how to do a transect on the page Methods.
There are other methodologies to count butterflies, like the 15-min Counts collected through the ButterflyCount mobile application, where your GPS tracks your route while counting butterflies for 15 minutes. All the data collected on this website will be shared with the Latvia BMS.
This free resource makes it easy to keep track of what you see, while making your data openly available for scientific research, education and conservation.
To see more information on the ButterflyCount app check the page: https://butterfly-monitoring.net/ebms-app
Monitoring Material
- Field Guides
A field guide to identify 30 butterfly species in Malta, with illustrations of the more recognizable species. This Guide aims to be useful for identifying butterflies in the field in an easy and simple way. Butterflies are divided by families, presenting symbols to mark specific characteristics with which to identify them and with information about ease to see them. Also, this Guide includes an explanation of the methodologies to monitor butterflies (transects and 15-min Counts).
You can download the pdf guide Field Guide Malta directly to your device or print it directly (select the booklet option in the printer) in two languages:
Acknowledgments for the photography permission and allow us the creation of this Field Guide Malta: and Guido Bonett, Aldo Catania, Sergio B. Marques Teixeira, Martin Wiemers, and Chris van Swaay. Paolo Mazzei, and Marco Bonifacino (www.leps.it).
-Transect Manual
Discover the transect methodology for butterfly monitoring, the methodology used to monitoring butterflies and understand their conservation status. In this manual, you will learn the simple and basic rules to follow when performing a transect.
eBMS Transect Manual (English)
Download the Field Sheet (pdf English) for registering your data on the field
- eBMS Guidelines
Download the complete eBMS guide on this link (in English). It includes information on how to create new transects, edit your transects, add visits and see where to generate the graphs of your data. Some parts of the guide could change, the website is updating.
eBMS Information
Here you can download an eBMS leaflet explaining the network, the project ABLE for promoting butterfly monitoring in Europe and some simple steps to do a butterfly transect in your area.
