1st European Congress on Odonatology Programme and abstracts

Dragonflies in Germany - The atlas-project of the GdO
(society of germanspeaking odonatologists)
Klaus-Jürgen Conze (for the project working group of the GdO)
Listerstr. 13, 45147 Essen, Germany
The project started in March 2007 with a declaration of the participants of the GdO´s annual meeting
in Dresden to create an atlas of the dragonflies in Germany. The publication of the atlas is planned for
2013. It will be the first time that the knowledge about dragonflies is put together for all 16 federal
states because these are independent in the matter of nature conservation and therefore the horizon
of faunistic work often lies within the frontiers of these states. So in the first year it was necessary to
built up a project group which organizes the atlas throughout germany with a net of coordinators for
every one of the 16 federal states (Bavaria, Northrhine-Westfalia, Saxonia, etc.). The next step was
the collection of already available and the research for new data. In some states regional atlases were
already published and in most countries do exist good databases from which the data could be
merged. This was started in autumn 2009 and in a short time around 780.000 datasets were available
for Germany with only major gaps in the northeastern states (especially in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern,
a state of large area but few odonatologists). Meanwhile exists also a team of authors for the
monographs of the 81 in germany so far known dragonfly species and some first prototype
monographs are produced. One major aspect of the german atlas project will be to contribute the
data to the <strong>European</strong> Atlas. The talk will deal with the background and the aims of this project but will
also show the development and first results. For further details please see: "www.libellula.org" or
especially for the atlas-project "www.libellen-verbreitungsatlas.de".
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