Wikipedia:Today's featured list/April 16, 2021
The Odonata species of Slovenia include 72 species of dragonflies and damselflies for which reliable records exist from the present territory of Slovenia. Odonata species from the territory of the present-day Slovenia were systematically studied by the naturalists Johann Weikhard von Valvasor and Giovanni Antonio Scopoli as early as the 17th and 18th century; however, the first systematic compendium was only published in the 1960s by the Slovene zoologist Boštjan Kiauta. The distribution of Odonata in Slovenia is now fairly well known by international standards, with Slovenia having been one of the first European countries for which a full account of faunistic data (an "atlas") was published. The number of species represents almost exactly half of the European species, and is comparable for example with the number of species of Germany and Spain, both much larger countries. The highly diverse odonate fauna of Slovenia is attributed to the position of the country on the junction of several ecoregions where many species reach the border of their distribution. (Full list...)