A decade of a project to document India's butterflies gets more ambitious

Butterflies of India (IFoundButterflies.org), a website launched by Kunte in 2010, crowd-sources images to map and document butterflies in India.

In December 2012, Nitin Ravikanthachari, a college student in Bengaluru, went to Hesaraghatta Lake, a freshwater reservoir popular with birders. A budding interest in nature photography had spurred him to make the trip to the city’s outskirts. He returned with many pictures, one of which was of a butterfly he couldn’t identify.

He sent the picture to Krushnamegh Kunte, an associate professor at Bengaluru’s National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS), to be uploaded to a digital database of Indian butterflies. “My jaw dropped when I saw that picture. This species had not been seen in 100 years,” recalls Kunte. Called Lilac