Studying the adverse effects of climate change on animal and plant species is one of the key points for biodiversity conservation. The mountain butterflies and in particular the populations present on the Apennines, provide an excellent model. Among these the butterfly Erebia pandrose is rapidly becoming a symbol of the consequences of climate change and the fight against these.
 

High-altitude mountain butterflies are very vulnerable to global warming, which paradoxically risk freezing to death. Their larvae, in fact, exploit the thermal insulation provided by the snowy layers to hibernate at temperatures milder than those of the atmosphere. Rising temperatures cause the snow melting early, thus exposing the larvae to excessively cold temperatures for their survival during the winter. To survive, therefore, the mountain butterflies are forced to move towards higher and colder areas: but this strategy remains impossible for the species that already occupy the tops of the mountains.
 

The Apennines, which represent an important hotspot of mountain biodiversity in Italy, provide the opportunity to study how climate change impacts on insect populations, and in particular on high mountain butterflies. Many of these populations are extremely isolated from each other and have developed in the course of their evolutionary history a strong genetic differentiation, which has allowed the formation of numerous endemisms. Endemisms represent the most precious part of the biodiversity to be protected: with the term "endemism", in fact, we mean all those species, subspecies and genetic lines unique in the world, present exclusively in a given area.

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The protection of the Apennine endemisms and the fight against climate change led our team to study as a model the high-altitude butterfly Erebia pandrose.
This species lives in habitats above the 2000 m and is present in the main European and Asian mountain ranges. In the Apennines, however, there is only one isolated population, which was last reported in 1977 on the top of the highest massif of the Laga Mountains, Mount Gorzano. Since then his stay in the Apennines had not been verified. The rediscovery and study of this population, 400 km far from the nearest alpine population, was the subject of the initiative Butterfly Week 2019. But the biggest discovery was that Erebia pandrose was not found in 2019 in the same area where it had been reported 42 years earlier, but 200 m higher. This shift of almost 5m/year is a clear sign of the effects of climate change and leaves strong fears about the future permanence of this species in the Apennines.