Intensive game keeping, coppicing and butterflies: The story of Milovicky Wood, Czech Republic

While transfers of formerly coppiced or grazed woodlands into shady high forests cause severe declines of woodland butterflies across Europe, increasing numbers of wild ungulates contribute to maintaining stand openness. To disentangle the relative effects of management and ungulates, we studied butterfly assemblages in the Milovicky Wood, southeastern Czech Republic. After centuries of short-rotation coppicing, the wood was abandoned in the 1950s and two game parks, for deer and mouflon, were established there in the 1960s. Comparisons of historical and recent records show severe declines, but the wood still hosts 83 butterfly and burnet species, including 19 nationally endangered ones. Recording along fixed transects disentangled effects of game keeping and management. Stands situated in the mouflon park hosted fewer species than those in either the deer park or outside of the parks. Clearings, coppice, coppice with standards and rides hosted more species than closed forest. The strongest predictors of composition of butterfly assemblages were plant communities and stand management, followed by vegetation covers, plant species richness and kind of game (mouflon, deer, none). Both game and management exhibited independent effects. Past high game densities contributed to butterfly losses, but have maintained open structures absent from woods managed for timber. Under reduced densities, mouflon exhibit adverse effects on butterflies but deer do not. Recent plans to transfer the area to high forest are incompatible with conserving local butterflies and incur high costs of forest protection against the animals. In contrast, re-establishment of active coppicing for fuel wood production would be optimal for butterflies, compatible with game keeping. Finding a balance between game and traditional forms of management offers an opportunity for threatened biodiversity of European lowland forests.