Environmental controls on butterfly occurrence and species richness in Israel: The importance of temperature over rainfall

Abstract

Butterflies are considered important indicators representing the state of biodiversity and key ecosystem functions, but their use as bioindicators requires a better understanding of how their observed response is linked to environmental factors. Moreover, better understanding how butterfly faunas vary with climate and land cover may be useful to estimate the potential impacts of various drivers, including climate change, botanical succession, grazing, and afforestation. It is particularly important to establish which species of butterflies are sensitive to each environmental driver. The study took place in Israel, including the West Bank and Golan Heights. To develop a robust and systematic approach for identifying how butterfly faunas vary with the environment, we analyzed the occurrence of 73 species and the abundance of 24 species from Israeli Butterfly Monitoring Scheme (BMS‐IL) data. We used regional generalized additive models to quantify butterfly abundance, and generalized linear latent variable models and generalized linear models to quantify the impact of temperature, rainfall, soil type, and habitat on individual species and on the species community. Species richness was higher for cooler transects, and also for hilly and mountainous transects in the Mediterranean region (rendzina and Terra rossa soils) compared with the coastal plain (Hamra soil) and semiarid northern Jordan Vale (loessial sierozem soil). Species occurrence was better explained by temperature (negative correlation) than precipitation, while for abundance the opposite pattern was found. Soil type and habitat were insignificant drivers of occurrence and abundance. Butterfly faunas responded very strongly to temperature, even when accounting for other environmental factors. We expect that some butterfly species will disappear from marginal sites with global warming, and a large proportion will become rarer as the region becomes increasingly arid.

Butterfly (Lepidoptera: Papilionoidae) diversity and structure community in Lumajang, East Java, Indonesia

“…and Euthalia malaccana (Fruhstorfer, 1899), and Dichorragia nesimachus (Boisduval, 1836) (Saha and Das 2012; Mehra et al 2018;Bhowmik and Chowdhury 2021;Peggie et al 2021). The result showed that butterflies could be bioindicators either in terms of the diversity of environmental characteristics (abundance and vegetation diversity) or sensitivity to environmental conditions (temperature, humidity, light intensity, wind speed, as well as the presence of pollutants) (Ghazanfar et al 2016;Comay et al 2021). This is consistent with some studies showing that several species tolerant to all conditions can be found in all habitat types.…”

“…Based on these findings, this study's results indicate that butterflies prefer habitats with optimal temperature and humidity, such as Community Forest. Furthermore, butterflies are poikilotherm organisms, so environmental temperature greatly influences their body temperature (Muhelni and Anwar 2020;Comay et al 2021). Temperature can also affect butterfly activity; for example, high temperatures can cause the volume of secretions in flowering plants to decrease, resulting in a lack of food intake (Ramesh et al 2012;Koneri et al 2022).…”

Combining environmental niche models, multi‐grain analyses, and species traits identifies pervasive effects of land use on butterfly biodiversity across Italy

“…Assessing spatial autocorrelation using Moran's I and correlograms confirmed that a spatially‐implicit model was appropriate for the data (Diniz‐Filho et al, 2003). Temperature and precipitation are well‐known drivers of butterfly species richness (Comay et al, 2021; Kerr et al, 2001), and we used these climatic gradients as an ecological null model to assess the importance of land use in determining biodiversity patterns after controlling for climate. To this end, we compared model goodness‐of‐fit, measured as R 2 , when including land use to the climatic model (Figures 2 and 3).…”

Species Richness of Papilionidae Butterflies (Lepidoptera: Papilionoidea) in the Hengduan Mountains and Its Future Shifts under Climate Change

“…Despite this high species richness, research on these butterflies in this particular area has long been limited to inventory surveys and taxonomic studies [ 9 , 10 , 11 ]; the spatial pattern of these butterflies and its underlying causes as well as responses to climate change remains poorly understood. However, butterflies are sensitive to climate change; temperature and rainfall in particular could affect butterflies’ genetic expression, flight-related morphological characters, life history and voltinism, trophic relationships, seasonality and phenology, behaviour and richness distribution pattern [ 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 ]. Highly mobile species could even achieve intercontinental expansion rapidly [ 17 ].…”