List of Odonata species of Slovenia

The list of Odonata species of Slovenia includes 72 species of dragonflies and damselflies (Slovene: kačji pastirji) for which reliable records exist from the present-day territory of Slovenia, including one that has not been seen since the 1960s and is presumed to have been extirpated (locally extinct), but could have simply been overlooked. The list is based on two reference works: Atlas of the Dragonflies (Odonata) of Slovenia,^[2] a joint publication of the Slovene Odonatological Society and the Slovene Centre for Cartography of Fauna and Flora from 1997, and the newer Atlas of the European dragonflies and damselflies (2015),^[3] supported by other, more recent publications in which new species described after 1997 were documented.

Odonata species from the territory of present-day Slovenia were systematically studied by the naturalists Johann Weikhard von Valvasor and Giovanni Antonio Scopoli as early as the 17th and 18th centuries; however, the first systematic compendium was only published in the 1960s by the Slovene zoologist Boštjan Kiauta [sl].^[1] The distribution of Odonata in Slovenia is now fairly well known by international standards, with Slovenia having been one of the first European countries for which a full account of faunistic data (an "atlas") was published. The number of species (72) represents almost exactly half of the European species (143) and is comparable with the number of species of Germany (81) and Spain (80), both much larger countries.^[3] Slovenian odonate fauna is therefore considered highly diverse, which is attributed to the country's position on the junction of several ecoregions where many species reach the border of their distribution.^[1]