John Hessler, FRGS

Biogeographer and Lepidopterist in Nice, France

John Hessler, FRGS

Biogeographer and Lepidopterist in Nice, France

Read my latest paper...

"The search for rare butterflies in the high mountains is not really a science, nor does it require too much technical mountaineering skill, and although it has many elements of both, it is mostly a path of extreme patience, more akin to the metaphysical aspects of meditation, than to anything else”. --John Hessler, “Searching for the Rarest Butterflies in the Alps”, 2024.

Biography

When not climbing in the Alps, looking for rare plants in the desert, or searching for endangered butterflies in a remote valley in the Pyrenees, I am an historical biogeographer, lepidopterist, and writer, living in Nice, France.

I am the creator and director of the LEP-LAB where our field oriented biogeographic research centers on mapping the intricate spatial distribution patterns of rare forms of high-altitude butterflies in the Pyrenees, and in the remote valleys of the parc national du Mercantour and the parc national des Écrins.

Interested in the changes in butterfly population distributions over time, we are working on reconstructing the historic distribution patterns of the critically endangered large blue butterfly, Maculinea arion, across Europe and the United Kingdom, from preserved museum specimens.

Our theoretical work is concentrated on analyzing the acoustic signals associated with Maculinea-Myrmica butterfly-ant interactions and mimicry, using machine learning, along with wavelet and signal processing techniques.

Fascinated by chaotic foraging patterns of butterflies, I am exploring the use of machine learning and the mathematics of superdiffusive processes, to study the movement patterns of the high-mountain butterfly genus, Erebia.

The author of more than one hundred articles, books, and reviews, including the New York Times bestseller, MAP: Exploring the World, my latest papers are, “To save lives: Lessons of a pandemic cartographer”, published in the Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers (2024), and “Mapping the Last Pool of Darkness: a Tribute to Cartographer Tim Robinson (1935-2020)”, which appeared in the Spring 2024 issue of The Portolan.

A Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society (FRGS), I find pondering the mysteries contained in ancient DNA, wondering about the fate of Colias ponteni, and marveling at the complexity and beauty to be found in Darwin’s tangled bank, strangely comforting.