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To reduce the population of the Asian tiger mosquito Aedes albopictus (Skuse, 1894) (Diptera: Culicidae), a mosquito control campaign was organized by five Slovenian municipalities in 2020. The campaign focused on the application of Aquatain AMFTM in public water containers. The main objective of our study was to test the efficacy of the agent by directly testing the water drains for mosquito larvae and monitoring the density of the mosquito population. The drains were inspected before and after the application of the product from May to September. A water sample was taken from the drains using a dipper. For mosquito monitoring, the number of mosquito eggs and adult mosquitoes was counted from June to October.

Maintenance of traditional cultural landscapes largely depends on traditional agricultural practices, which are nowadays in decline as a result of increasingly intensive and mechanised land use. Losing traditional practices may result in impoverishing of picturesque mosaic landscape and biodiversity. This research focuses on land-use changes in two time periods (2002–2008; 2013–2016) and effects of changes reflecting on populations of critically endangered butterfly. False Ringlet, Coenonympha oedippus (Lepidoptera: Nymphalidae), is a habitat specialist, which in Slovenia inhabits two geographically distinct contrasting habitats – dry meadows in south-western and wetlands in central Slovenia. We compared nine environmental parameters to assess environmental differences, which shape species habitat; seven parameters significantly differ among the four geographical regions and five among the two habitat types. Four parameters significantly differ (i.e. at least in two regions) when tested for homogeneity, while in dry habitat type all (except slope) were significant and none in wet habitat. Changes in land use in two studied periods lit up two processes: transformation of meadows into agricultural land and overgrowing of the meadows, both processes affecting species severely. We believe that maintaining of traditional landscapes in future could serve as a good conservation practice for this endangered species.

We implemented a detailed morphometry and multivariate statistics to establish a general, large-scale racial differentiation in Asellus aquaticus (L.) sensu Racovitza. We ascertained that in surface populations a set of 11 morphometric characters might equivalently be represented by the pleopod respiratory area size alone. The analyses resulted in a distinct distribution pattern, with the large respiratory area populations disposed mainly along the Dinaric karst between southern Slovenia and western Macedonia and surrounded by the medium respiratory area morph, spatially irregularly substituted by the small area morph. This pattern is in contradiction with the distribution pattern of molecularly defined clades (as shown by Verovnik et al. 2005 ). We could find no ecological, hydrographical or paleogeographical explanations for such distribution pattern either. The only hypothetical explanation would be a preservation of the large respiratory area as a plesiomorphic character in the comparatively sheltered karst habitats, while throughout the easier accessible parts of the species range it was replaced by the ‘modern’ smaller area size. While a diminution of the respiratory area functionally means an increased sclerotization – hardening of pleopod IV–V exopodites, endopodites of pleopods III–V remain less sclerotized, probably respiratory and osmoregulatory functional. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We studied the richness and structure of the coprophagous Scarabaeoidea community in two pastures (Hrastovlje and Zazid) in sub–Mediterranean Slovenia. In each pasture, we examined three habitat patches characterised by different levels of grazing (S1, the active part of the pasture; S2, the overgrown part of the pasture, mainly spiny shrubs; S3, a meadow with some overgrown patches of shrubs outside the fenced pasture). The main results were as follows: (1) 29 species were sampled, corresponding to about three quarters of the species presumably present at the two study sites; (2) species richness and abundance in Zazid are were similar in all three patches; (3) the species richness and abundance in Hrastovlje (in total, and separately for dwellers and tunnelers) were highest in S2. In Hrastovlje, dwellers were most abundant in S1. As the two different habitat patches were shown to positively influence the dung beetle community, we recommend maintaining a traditionally–managed mosaic landscape.

The Slovenian False Ringlet Coenonympha oedippus populations are under serious threat, as in the last two decades have witnessed a sharp decline in population distribution and size due to destruction, fragmentation and/or habitat quality degradation through intensive agriculture, abandonment of use and urbanization. We investigated the genetic diversity and structure of C. oedippus from the entire range of the species in Slovenia. Our results showed that the genetic variation in the Slovenian C. oedippus populations agrees with the geographical structure and the ecotypes previously determined by morphological and ecological data. We confirmed the existence of four genetically divergent and spatially non-overlapping geographical groups (Istria, Karst, Gorica, Ljubljansko barje) and two ecotypes ("wet" and "dry"). Despite small sample sizes due to critically threatened species, the results indicated significant nuclear and mitochondrial genetic diversity within the spatial groups. By gaining new insights into the evolutionary history of the C. oedippus population, we have recommended to consider the Slovenian population as one Evolutionary Significant Unit, and four spatial populations as Management Units for conservation purposes.

Five decades ago, a landmark paper in Science titled The Cave Environment heralded caves as ideal natural experimental laboratories in which to develop and address general questions in geology, ecology, biogeography, and evolutionary biology. Although the 'caves as laboratory' paradigm has since been advocated by subterranean biologists, there are few examples of studies that successfully translated their results into general principles. The contemporary era of big data, modelling tools, and revolutionary advances in genetics and (meta)genomics provides an opportunity to revisit unresolved questions and challenges, as well as examine promising new avenues of research in subterranean biology. Accordingly, we have developed a roadmap to guide future research endeavours in subterranean biology by adapting a well-established methodology of 'horizon scanning' to identify the highest priority research questions across six subject areas. Based on the expert opinion of 30 scientists from around the globe with complementary expertise and of different academic ages, we assembled an initial list of 258 fundamental questions concentrating on macroecology and microbial ecology, adaptation, evolution, and conservation. Subsequently, through online surveys, 130 subterranean biologists with various backgrounds assisted us in reducing our list to 50 top-priority questions. These research questions are broad in scope and ready to be addressed in the next decade. We believe this exercise will stimulate research towards a deeper understanding of subterranean biology and foster hypothesis-driven studies likely to resonate broadly from the traditional boundaries of this field., (© 2020 Cambridge Philosophical Society.)