Various species and colours flutter freely and butterfly pupae are suspended in a structure as they grow into adult insects inside a greenhouse of the Museo delle Scienze (MUSE), a science museum in Trento, Italy.
The ecosystem created in this greenhouse is modelled on part of a mountain range and rainforest area in south-central Tanzania.
“The butterfly forest project is contextualized in the MUZE tropical greenhouse, which is strongly focused on the Tanzanian environment of the Udzungwa Mountains, and this is because the museum has an ecology monitoring centre in Tanzania, in that national park,” Lisa Angelini, MUSE greenhouse director says.
Through a partnership with Tanzania National Parks, MUSE in 2006 established the Udzungwa Ecological Monitoring Centre to support the park in ecological monitoring and biodiversity research, as well as to support development of environmental education programs for schools.
The forest in Trento is designed to create public awareness on some of the research that MUSE is doing in Udzungwa Mountains to study and protect the world’s biodiversity against threats such as deforestation and climate change.
Deforestation leads to habitat loss, which causes declines in nectar sources for butterflies, changing the functioning of the ecosystem.
By fragmenting forests, deforestation limits the movements of the insects and reducing their genetic diversity.
These impacts cause declines in biodiversity and potential extinction of vulnerable butterfly species.
The body temperatures and metabolic rates of butterflies are influenced by air and soil temperatures.
Climate change is altering the life cycles of the insects, impacting their development rates, mating behaviours, and migration patterns.
Butterfly populations are declining in many areas, especially in places under intensive land use.
Conservations strategies
The scientists behind the Butterfly Forest hope that their research will spur the development of conservation strategies aimed at increasing knowledge of butterfly communities in specific habitats and monitoring their distribution over space and time.
“Our aim is that of being able to study better, to understand better what is happening,” says Lisa Angelini, a botanist and director of the MUSE greenhouse. “Our work consists of monitoring and trying to give, to develop projects in order to bring attention to biodiversity-related issues, so that we can always do better.”
The butterflies fluttering around the facility are currently mainly sourced from butterfly farming projects in Costa Rica and feature insects native to South America and Asia, for reasons of transport and availability.
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