The last 10 years I caught and identified flies (Diptera) with more or less constant effort but with (well) increasing skills, and therefore with increasing speed. The total amount of 20377 specimens is apportioned to 1721 species of which 1645 are documented in the Gallery. I left species undocumented mostly because I was'nt sufficiently sure about my identification and the photos were too bad to ask someone else, and in all cases I still hope to catch a better specimen.

Below you see a table of places where I caught flies together with some simple numbers. The place names are links to the species list with some additional information. As diversity indices I chose the "Simpson Index", because it is easy to understand (probability, that any 2 specimens belong to the same species), the entropy of mixing (also called "Shannon Index") and the "Evenness", the entropy normalized by its maximum value when all species are equally abundant.

Possibly I'm overly reluctant to do statistical comparisons of, e.g. rarefied samples. In the last two chapters below you can read why.

• Regional Overview
• Basic Statistics
• Some Derivations and Criticism

The final conclusion after all these statistical conjectures and criticisms: the total number of Diptera species in this region is definitely not below 2000, but rather somewhere between 2500 and 3000.