Over 25 years ago the project of collaborative work devoted to the present stage of butterfly and moth fauna of Saratov, Ulyanovsk and Samara districts and adjoining territories of the Volga region, such as the vast collected material on which demanded the compilation and publishing was discussed by us – three friends and colleagues – Vasily Anikin, Sergey Sachkov and Vadim Zolotuhin, who became the authors of the present edition. As result the conclusion was drawn by us, that it is effective to use as a comparative base well known writing work of E. Eversmann Fauna lepidopterologica Volgo-Uralensis also taking into consideration that its sesquicentennial jubilee has come. Necessity of summarizing on this, as it looked to us, the best investigated group was motivated by the number of circumstances: on one side, the “popularity” of butterflies (as members of our first part of the cycle), which from the collectors’ point of view takes an important sufficiently reasoned role to complete the species list of Middle Volga region at that moment, and on another side, the need in combination of odd bits of information and their faunistic and taxonomic revision. Moreover, all available significant works at that time were devoted to the vast regions, with only a little concerning mostly interest layer of the Volga region entomofauna, which is frontier between Europe and Asia, or hopeless depreciated both taxonomic and quantitative. Winged by an idea of the creation sufficiently large work we have started to undertake a task energetically, however we had soon stumbled upon the serious nomenclatural and some other problems as well as extreme inequality of the territorial investigation. All this demanded the additional efforts and investigations, searching of a little known and hard to access literature, appealing to fundamental, mainly Russian, collections and so on. In the course of expeditionary work the additional material was collected also on other groups of Lepidoptera, that let us to extend the range of interests and, based on the fundamental writing of E. Eversmann, to “hit” the entire order Lepidoptera and to extend geographically the region additionally including into the area of interests also Astrakhan and Volgograd Areas and also Bashkiria and North-Western Kazakhstan in order to maximally walk up to the geographical outlines of the region, which was investigated by this outstanding naturalist of the 19th century in the whole. For widening of interest toward entire order of Lepidoptera, the series of lepidopterological hand-books of European part of the USSR published up to this time were also favored, and these series initiated the natural increase of interest to the regional faunistic investigations letting determination of the collected material with high degree of reliability, especially among so named Microlepidoptera identification, that earlier created the formidable difficulties. The structure of the work we decided to offer in the table form not only with a view to economy of place, but also for readers’ convenience for searching of needful information. Order of taxa and nomenclatural decision are based on the available up to that time and mostly accepted in the professional sphere sources of literature and systems of different groups having worked out by Russian and foreign specialists. Into the information block we decided to include data on the imago phenology, preferential biotopes and also larval feeding preferences, among of them the special emphasis was placed on the original data. The distribution in the region is showed by marks in columns imaging the subjects of administration division of territory for what the standard marks of presence/absence and also marking of the type locality and so on. This cycle has been published up till now during almost 20 years also according to accumulation of data on each group up to understanding by the authors of decisive completeness of information, therefore the order of each part published had no systematic dependence.weiterlesen