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This is a list of all the literature and databases I rely on to identify butterflies and dragon- and damselflies, respectively. For my other "helpers" please check the "Setup" page which includes links to Merlin Bird ID and Flora Incognita.
a comprehensive online guide and art project by Jörg Riedel covering flora, fauna, fungi, geology and more
[GER] "Tagfalter in ThĂĽringen"
database by the Workgroup of Bavarian Entomologists Society
[GER] "Schmetterlinge in Bayern"
database by the Workgroup of Bavarian Entomologists Society
[GER] "Portal fĂĽr Schmetterlinge / Raupen"
a guide by the German Federation for the Environment and Nature Conservation organization targeting laymen, professionals and teachers
an online guide to accurately identify butterflies native to Austria but with a stronger focus on blues
another Austrian guide
Tolman, Lewington (2012): "Field Guide Butterflies of Britain and Europe"
(I'm using the German edition published by KOSMOS which is different in many aspects compared to the original. Both are included for clarity.)
[GER] "Die Schmetterlinge Europas und Nordwestafrikas"
[ENG] Collins Butterfly Guide Tom Tolman and Richard Lewington
Settele et al. (2015): "Schmetterlinge – Die Tagfalter Deutschlands"
This guide is published by the Helmholtz Center for Environmental Research via"Ulmer NaturfĂĽhrer". I received it from my Austrian friend as part of our book exchange and excludes butterflies native to the Alps.
an online guide, monitoring database and macro photography project covering dragon- and damselflies in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and the rest of Europe by Andreas Thomas Hein
another online guide and shop covering dragon- and damselflies in Germany, Austria and Switzerland
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iNaturalist is a popular app to identify anything related to nature. Despite this, it's hardly used among Germans and the data for my region in particular is extremely sparse and of poor quality. On top of this, it encourages the voluntary sharing of each users exact motion profiles which can de-anonymize users not sharing their full names and promotes "self-doxxing" among those not hiding their full names.
Besides the obvious privacy concerns, their UX on both my iPhone and my PC's is terrible and their AI tends to get even the most obvious things wrong or refuses to identify it – I tested both the main app and "Seek" once and both not only drained my phone's battery insanely fast but failed at accurately detecting the European columbine (Aquilegia vulgaris), first providing a vastly different result and then claiming to be "unknown".
Some general stuff I came across whilst researching iNaturalist that naturally is not exclusive to "citizen science":
"A word of warning about iNaturalist" – BugGuide.net
"The problem with blindly using biodiversity databases" – iNaturalist Forum
Altrudi (2020): "Connecting to nature through tech? The case of the iNaturalist app"
I'm having a particular issue with the following thread because I happen to have "cultivated" the European columbine by sheer accident in my yard. The funny thing about this plant is that it's gotten insanely rare "in the wild" and now prefers areas in and around gardens. It's easily to pick up seeds with your shoes without noticing, yet variants that are undoubtedly cultivated (different colors, different shapes and sizes etc.) do NOT spread like that. A. vulgaris in its natural state is both wild and cultivated, however iNaturalist users tend towards a strict black-and-white dichotomy. The same thing also applies to certain birds, particularly ducks.
I have to admit that I was tempted to join the monitoring, yet each project demands my full name to be published. Additionally I became aware of the Bavarian Workgroup having standardized a transect scheme that's significantly different from other monitoring programs, with transects encompassing a radius of five kilometers (the Europe-wide standard requires each transect to to encompass no more than one kilometer).
Whilst searching for historical data for my region, I also came across a handful of documents indicating that the head of the database for Thuringia omits a significant amount of data particularly from the GDR period (1949 - 1989) and data collected between 1936 and 1960 and does not provide any interpretation of the included graphs, rather using the data "as is" to work on the list of endangered butterflies, also excluding valid limitations such as the varying amount of volunteers collecting data to assess the population health (e.g. the year of 2023 marks a sharp decline across all species, yet one is forced to manually search through "Observations" to discover that this project lost the majority of volunteers beginning in 2022). The graphs themselves, just like among most environmental research conducted in Germany, are partially unreadable due to the seemingly random x- and y-axes; the quadrants themselves encompass a radius of five kilometers and are further divided into four circles each which hide "hard borders" such as Autobahnen and group areas drastically different from each other together.
To provide an example for the latter, my village is part of a quadrant which carries the name of a town ten kilometers north from it. The town itself is surrounded by agriculture, whereas my village is largely shaped by agriculture, the forest roughly three kilometers to the north, separating my village from said town, and abandoned areas like my main study zones. The few villages in-between range from largely arid to typical wetlands, yet there is another "hard border" between two villages, as both are located in separate districts. My district is much more strict in terms of "keeping nature clean", whereas the northern district tends to be much more liberal towards "weeds" and is, on avergae, much more humid. Meanwhile, the town just one kilometer south of my village is counted towards its own quadrant, despite its species composition being nearly identical to that of my village. No quadrant is being set based on a consistent pattern of biotopes not species composition, making proper assessments especially difficult and borderline pointless due to the large size of each quadrant.
If I'd get paid, I would clean this mess up and enforce stricter and more scientific standards but alas, I am not, and contributing to this would convolute my separate research that follows a vastly different set of criteria (e.g. a strict geographical limit/bias based on biotopes and butterfly species composition alone whilst refusing to make predictions or collect absolute numbers of individuals and rejecting classifications based on how "threatened" a species is).