Araneae Sloveniae: a national spider species checklist

Abstract The research of the spider fauna of Slovenia dates back to the very beginning of binomial nomenclature, and has gone through more and less prolific phases with authors concentrating on taxonomy, faunistics, ecology and zoogeographic reviews. Although the body of published works is remarkable for a small nation, the faunistic data has remained too scattered for a thorough understanding of regional biotic diversity, for comparative and ecological research, and for informed conservation purposes. A national checklist is long overdue. Here, a critical review of all published records in any language is provided. The species list currently comprises 738 species, is published online at http://www.bioportal.si/katalog/araneae.php under the title Araneae Sloveniae, and will be updated in due course. This tool will fill the void in cataloguing regional spider faunas and will facilitate further araneological research in central and southern Europe.


Introduction
At roughly 20,000 km 2 , Slovenia's territory may be relatively small, but its position in between the Mediterranean, Alpine, Dinaric and Pannonic biogeographic regions is unique, and consequently, its native biota is rich and remarkable. Despite several active episodes of spider research in Slovenia, reviewed by Kuntner and Šereg (2002), a comprehensive national spider checklist has not been available, yet is long overdue. Our aim is to provide a critically filtered list of all relevant literature, in any language, that listed data relevant for Slovenian spider faunistics, and a list of all spider species recorded in this territory, cleaned for dubious, erroneous, and synonymous records. This checklist is simultaneously published online facilitating regular updates.

Materials and methods
The present checklist is based on all published literature containing information on spiders found in the territory of Slovenia but also includes several new records based on recently collected material. The classification and nomenclature follow the World Spider Catalog version 15.5 (2014). Families, genera and species are listed alphabetically. For each species, all relevant literature regarding its presence in Slovenia is followed by synonyms (as they occur in the literature) indicated by an equals sign (=). In this paper, all references relevant to Slovenian spider fauna are marked with [*] in order to distinguish them from other cited literature sources.
The new, previously unrecorded species in the list are marked by an asterisk and followed by a description of the collecting site, geographic data (latitude, longitude, altitude), date of collection and sampling method, and the data on the collector/material provider and species identifying authority. The specimens of previously unrecorded species are deposited in the collections of the Department of Biology, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, and the Institute of Biology, Scientific Research Centre, Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Ljubljana, Slovenia.

Species list
The Slovenian spider species list, published online as Araneae Sloveniae ver. 1.0 (http://www.bioportal.si/katalog/araneae.php), currently comprises 738 species belonging to 286 genera and 43 families (Table 1) and will be updated in due course. This list considerably exceeds the 590 spider species recorded to occur in Slovenia in Fauna Europaea (Van Helsdingen 2013) and almost doubles the records reported in the outdated checklist of Slovenian (within the Yugoslavian) spider fauna (Nikolić and Polenec 1981). This number was largely reached by adding original data published since the old catalogue but also by adding numerous overlooked records.

Family Amaurobiidae
Amaurobius pallidus L. Koch, 1868 The single specimen recorded (Kostanjšek 2005) was misidentified and the species should be omitted from the list.

Family Araneidae
Argiope lobata (Pallas, 1772) The author (Polenec 1952) affiliates the species to Primorje, which in this case refers to coastal region of the former Yugoslavia. However, the species has never been recorded in Slovenia.

Family Cybaeidae
Cybaeus angustiarum L. Koch, 1868 As the species is restricted to eastern parts of Central Europe, East and South-East Europe (Maurer 1992), the single specimen listed in Novak (2005b) most likely belongs to Cybaeus tetricus (C. L. Koch, 1839).

Family Mimetidae
Ero cambridgei Kulczyński, 1911 The single specimen (Kostanjšek 2005) was re-determined as E. tuberculata (De Geer, 1778) by the author of the original paper.

Unconfirmed records
The following records were listed in the checklist of Yugoslav spiders (Nikolić and Polenec 1981) as expected in Slovenia, however their presence has not been confirmed.

Nomina nuda
The following genus-species combinations used by authors in parentheses have not been used in any taxonomic literature.

Conclusions
We provided a critical review of all literature relevant for the Slovenian spider fauna, and provided the first comprehensive national species list. This tool will fill the void in cataloguing regional European spider faunas and allow country wide comparisons (Kuntner and Šereg 2002). Additionally, it will facilitate further araneological research in Slovenia, perhaps solidifying the already existing trend for a shift away from strictly descriptive biology towards large scale revisionary, phylogenetic, ecological, biogeographical and experimental science. Such a shift would reinforce this species list's utility and value as baseline biological data.