European database of the life-history, morphological and habitat characteristics of dragonflies (Odonata)

Abstract

Climate change and an ever-increasing effect of humans on the great majority of freshwater ecosystems have affected not only individual organisms but also the links between them. In order to effectively protect communities or entire freshwater ecosystems, we need to understand how individual organisms react to these changes and the functional interconnections between individual species. This can be achieved by evaluating the functioning of individual species, i.e. their traits. Dragonflies and damselflies are increasingly used as indicators of changes in freshwater ecosystems. Although this taxonomic group is the subject of many ecological studies, there is no comprehensive database of the traits of European species. This is, why we decided to lay the foundations for an European database of dragonfly traits called dragonfly-database.eu, which is mainly based on Web of Science (WOS) publications and several monographs, and currently includes information on 79 European species. The main advantage of our database is that it is open to downloading, uploading, and storing of data. This is extremely important, because a database's applicability increases with the quality of the data it contains. Initially in compiling the database, we encountered several fundamental shortcomings in the knowledge of some often easily measurable traits in, some species. We believe that in combination with new statistical methods dragonfly-database.eu will become a very useful tool for many ecological studies and more effective conservation of threatened species.

Keywords

• odonata
• dragonfly
• damselfly
• freshwater insects
• functional ecology
• biology
• morphology
• database
• europe