Moth observations at the National Moth Week 2024 event
About the National Moth Week event series
In 2024, we once again joined the National Moth Week event series that appeals to moth enthusiasts.
National Moth Week promotes the beauty and diversity of moths. The event encourages people of all ages and experience levels to observe, study and document moths in their own gardens or other nearby locations. Participants get a unique opportunity to contribute to collecting scientific data about moth distribution through community research.
The izeltlabuak.hu website primarily focuses on arthropods found in Hungary. This entry also deals with Hungarian fauna.
izeltlabuak.hu's call and participation
The izeltlabuak.hu community education and data sharing platform once again actively participated in this worldwide event, as we also consider the preservation and knowledge of moths our passion. To participate in the event, we called the attention of moth enthusiasts to joint moth observations. On Facebook and the website interface, we asked the community to organize their own moth observation events and share them on some data sharing platform.
As one such opportunity, we recommended sharing on the iNaturalist platform. A project was created for the event where moths recorded on the platform during the event period were collected.
izeltlabuak.hu also provided an opportunity to record and review moths during the event period. The observations saved this way were made public on the subpage created for the National Moth Week 2024 event.
If you wanted to participate in the event on the izeltlabuak.hu interface, you had to register your observation event on the organizers' website. If this happened, you could also register for the event on the izeltlabuak.hu interface. This way, your observations participated in the project and appeared on the event summary page.
Results
244,589 moth recordings were made worldwide on the iNaturalist platform during National Moth Week 2024. 1,122 observations came from Hungary. Not specifically for the event, but filtered for moths during the event period.
User activity and feedback showed that the event was very popular in Hungary. On the izeltlabuak.hu interface:
- 25 moth families
- 205 genera
- 265 species,
- 20 participants a total of 915 observations were recorded.
Of these:
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9 families
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149 genera
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220 species Macrolepidoptera,
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16 families
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52 genera
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45 species Microlepidoptera recordings.
Rarer species were also observed. Outstanding observations:
Hungarian contributions on the organizers' website
Connection to other events
izeltlabuak.hu is closely connected to another similar event. We wrote a summary about the European Moth Nights 2024 event in our blog post.
Conclusion
During this special week, users made new acquaintances, gained new knowledge, enriched the database and contributed to better understanding of moths. The identifications made by experts guaranteed the quality and scientific value of the data.
The committed participants not only observed and documented moths, but also contributed to the global mapping of moths and the resulting scientific results. The community's cohesion, cooperation and commitment made it possible for izeltlabuak.hu to be a partner of the National Moth Week event.
We express our gratitude to the organizers for sharing their passion for moths, to all those who participated in the National Moth Week 2024 event, and to those who contributed to the identification of observations.
