Details on the spatial arrangement and the amounts of different land types surrounding semi-natural habitat patches can be of major relevance for successful environmental management and to identify priorities for conservation action. However, the scale at which landscape structure should be measured is unclear. This is due to the fact that different species respond to their environment at different scales.

Assessing how the relative effects of landscape factors change with scale is of great importance to inform conservation decisions and to gain insight into the interactions between patch suitability and the landscape. Therefore, I aimed to find at which scale different groups of butterflies respond to the amount of different land-use types and which of these types has a stronger effect over butterfly diversity. In addition, I tested how heterogeneous the surrounding landscape was in order to determine how the composition of the landscape affected butterfly diversity.