Brachyiulus jawlowskii Lohmander 1928

87. Brachyiulus jawlowskii Lohmander, 1928

MD, RO, PL, RU-RUC, RU-RUE, RU-RUS, UA.The forest-steppe belt of Kazakhstan, Russia, including SW Siberia, the Ukraine, reaching Moldova, Eastern Romania and just into Poland to the west.

It occurs in broad-leaved and mixed forest in the Eastern European Plain, including the more southerly meadow-steppes of the Volga and Don Basins, usually in the litter. Several sites are on limestone. Among habitats cited by Prisnyi (2001) in the Middle-Russian upland are primary Quercus forest, limestone denudations and calciphilous steppe with Hyssopus and Artemisia. Jastrzębski (2012) found it on Poa pratensis -Festuca rubra meadows in Poland. Records from SW Siberia and Kazakhstan are from anthropogenous and semi-anthropogenus habitats (Nefediev et al. 2014).

The species is a subendemic of the forest-steppe (Chornyi & Golovatch 1993) and according to the map in Prisnyi (2001) has a discontinuous distribution. There seems to be a substantial gap between the records from the eastern area including parts of the Districts of Kirov, Tatarstan, Bashkortostan, Chuvashia and Ulyanovsk and the main western body of records going west from the interfluvial area between the Don and the lower Volga through the basins of the Dnieper and the Dniester to those of the Siret in Romania and the Bug in Poland (Jastrzebski 2012). Jastrzebski added that it ranges from the Taiga (boreal coniferous forest) in the north to the semi-desert belt in the south. The optimal area appears to be within the steppe belt east of the Dnieper (Wytwer et al. 2009); the Middle-Russian Upland is an area which harbours relict species.