The biodiversity of our Planet Earth is under threat by multiple anthropogenic causes like climate change, habitat destruction and agricultural intensification. In this trend, having a detailed and complete catalogue of organisms of the countries is a crucial prerequisite for any further conservation steps. Although the vertebrates of Iran are well-catalogued, the lists of most invertebrate groups are only fragmentary published. Based on these mostly out-of-dated lists, it is hard to understand the general patterns of most animal groups in this country. Additionally, any further protection and management planning on the fauna of the country would be misleading. A recently published inventory catalogue of the order Lepidoptera in Iran summarised the data of all up to now published literature on the Lepidoptera fauna of the country. Altogether, 4,812 species in 70 families are regarded as present in Iran, and 114 species are regarded as error reports. The catalogue sorted all species phylogenetically and listed the synonym names that were reported from Iran, gave detailed information on the provincial distribution of each species, and listed the type localities when they were in Iran as well as the endemic species. Finally, whenever needed, remarks were added to clarify misspellings and odder ambiguities. As the largest ever published project on the fauna of Iran, this catalogue will be introduced as a model for the mega project “Fauna Iranica”.

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