Platycheirus melanopsis
Key Details
| Taxonomic Groups: | Invertebrate > insect - true fly (Diptera) > Hoverfly |
| Red List Status: | Near Threatened (Not Relevant) [NT(nr)] |
| D5 Status: | Included in the baseline Red List Index for England (Wilkins, Wilson & Brown, 2022) |
| Section 41 Status: | (not listed) |
| Taxa Included Synonym: | (none) |
| UKSI Recommended Name: | Platycheirus melanopsis |
| UKSI Recommended Authority: | Loew, 1856 |
| UKSI Recommended Qualifier: | (none specified) |
| Red List Citation: | Ball & Morris, 2014 |
| Notes on taxonomy/listing: | (none) |
Criteria
| Question 1: | Does species need conservation or recovery in England? |
| Response: | Yes |
| Justification: | Clearly very rare in England with Confirmed English records confined to a few montane sites in the Lake District plus a questionable record shown for Dorset (wrong habitat!) |
| Question 2: | Does recovery/ conservation depend on species-specific actions? |
| Response: | No |
| Justification: | Poor understanding of specific needs but probably requires upland grassland habitats and benefits from connectivity of these. Encourage ongoing amateur recording of hoverflies in montane areas of England in the hope that it detects this species. It is not thought that targeted surveying would reveal many new populations given we have such a poor understanding of where it lives. |
| Question 3: | At a landscape scale, would the species benefit from untargeted habitat management to increase habitat mosaics, structural diversity, or particular successional stages? |
| Response: | Yes |
| Justification: | Seems to require montane and submontane heathland or grassland. Precise requirements unclear but larvae possibly predators of the upland scale insect Arctorthezia cataphracta (which attacks a variety of plants). However larvae also said to have been found on aphid colonies on thistles of Alpine meadows. In Britain, the hoverfly could be impacted by heather burning or overgrazing or climate change. |
Species Assessment
Not relevant as no Key Actions defined.
Key Actions
No Key Actions Defined
Acknowledgment:
Data used on this website are adapted from Threatened species recovery actions 2025 baseline (JP065): Technical report and spreadsheet user guide (Natural England, 2025). Available here.