Habitat of Carabus zawadzkii (Coleoptera: Carabidae) in the Eastern Carpathians

. This paper provides an analysis of the rare and important Natura 2000 species Carabus zawadzkii in terms of its ecological niche, conservation status and relationship with other Carabus species in carabid assemblages. Published sources are inconsistent in de fi ning the habitats in which this species occurs. Therefore, a large part of this paper is dedicated to identify-ing the relationship of Carabus zawadzkii with particular non-forest habitats based on fi eld research conducted in 2011–2013. The results revealed an unexpected af fi nity of this species for non-forest habitats in addition to the know relationship with forest habitats. Further analysis, using additional fi eld data collected over the period 2013–2021, also focused on the assessment of the current conservation status of this rare species. Overall, the population of this species seems stable; however, to improve its conservation status it requires particular management measures. Important conservation measures include periodic extensive mowing of mountain hay meadows. This species’ seasonal dynamics provides important information for nature conservationists. It is important to carry out research on this species in May, when it is most active. Presented results provide the most comprehensive overview of the ecological preferences and occurrence of this important and very rare Carpathian species. Carlo permutation test (Ter 2018; & Lepš, 2014) of the full model, with 1999 iterations. Software CANOCO5 was used for this purpose. A signi fi cance level of α = 0.05 was used to test the parameters of the variables. Results for all of the 20 localities studied were tested. Species richness and Shannon’s index were calculated using the statistical package in MS Excel.To evaluate the signi fi cance of the carabid assemblages at the localities we used sample averages (number of individuals at a locality / total number of species), counts (number of species at the localities), recount (number of species at a locality / total number of species), variance (sample variance), total (sum of speci-mens), N2 (Simpsons index = 1 / Σ (pi)2), H´ (Shannon entropy = – ∑ pi * lnpi), H´max (log number of species in samples) and evenness (sample H´ / log (N) ratio). These data were exported from the Canoco5 program using the menu Statistics of composi-tional table (Šmilauer & Lepš, 2014). We chose ordination methods based on the greatest lengths of the environmental gradient (lengths of gradient = SD units) as described by Šmilauer & Lepš (2014).We used 11 environmental variables to de fi ne the characteristics of a site: cover (E1%), abandoned meadows, building mowed meadows and type of (coded as 6 dummy variables: Nardo strictae-Agrostion Calamagrostion Calthion Arrhenatherion , , Caricion lasiocarpae 0.05)