The role of shrubs in maintaining butterfly biodiversity in grasslands

Hedgerows are an essential component of the agricultural and grassland landscapes of many farms and semi-natural grasslands around the world, and their management plays an important role in enhancing habitat biodiversity. In this article, we show how shrub-removal management practices affect butterfly and plant communities in a small region of Transylvania, Romania. We compared across the 15 sites the abundance and diversity of butterfly species in four different shrub managed plots and found for each type of management indicator species, such as Cupido argiades in sites where shrubs were cut one year prior to our first year sampling, Anthocaris cardamines, Melitaea phoebe, Glaucopsyche alexis and Thymelicus sylvestris, Thymelicus lineola where shrubs were removed three years prior to our first year sampling and Colias alfacariensis where shrubs were removed more than 3 years prior to our first year sampling.