Trade‐offs for butterfly alpha and beta diversity in human‐modified landscapes and tropical rainforests

Abstract

The accelerating expansion of human populations and associated economic activity across the globe have made maintaining large, intact natural areas increasingly challenging. The difficulty of preserving large intact landscapes in the presence of growing human populations has led to a growing emphasis on landscape approaches to biodiversity conservation with a complementary strategy focused on improving conservation in human‐modified landscapes. This, in turn, is leading to intense debate about the effectiveness of biodiversity conservation in human‐modified landscapes and approaches to better support biodiversity in those landscapes. Here, we compared butterfly abundance, alpha richness, and beta diversity in human‐modified landscapes (urban, sugarcane) and natural, forested areas to assess the conservation value of human‐modified landscapes within the Wet Tropics bioregion of Australia. We used fruit‐baited traps to sample butterflies and analyzed abundance and species richness in respective land uses over a one‐year period. We also evaluated turnover and spatial variance components of beta diversity to determine the extent of change in temporal and spatial variation in community composition. Forests supported the largest numbers of butterflies, but were lowest in each, alpha species richness, beta turnover, and the spatial beta diversity. Sugarcane supported higher species richness, demonstrating the potential for conservation at local scales in human‐modified landscapes. In contrast, beta diversity was highest in urban areas, likely driven by spatial and temporal variation in plant composition within the urban landscapes. Thus, while improving conservation on human‐modified landscapes may improve local alpha richness, conserving variation in natural vegetation is critical for maintaining high beta diversity.

Socioeconomic and environmental factors jointly shape beta diversity of woody species in eastern China

“…Vegetation restoration and biodiversity conservation in richer counties may lead to higher heterogeneity among forest communities within the county (Hope et al, 2003). For example, Sambhu et al (2018) found that the beta diversity in urban areas was higher than in other habitat types due to the spatial and temporal variations of plant composition; and Clarke et al (2013) found that the highest beta tree diversity was found in high‐income locations. Besides, studies have shown that a number of small fragments will accumulate more species than few large fragments due to the higher environmental heterogeneity among small patches (Fahrig, 2020).…”

“…However, the socioeconomic factors are rarely considered simultaneously in analyzing beta diversity. Although some studies have tried to disentangle the effect of socioeconomic factors on beta diversity of animal communities such as fish (Lazzari et al, 2020), moth (Dantas de Miranda et al, 2019), and butterfly communities (Sambhu et al, 2018), few studies have tested whether socioeconomic factors play an important role in the beta diversity of forest communities across different administrative units (but see Clarke et al, 2013;Elo et al, 2018). Anthropogenic factors may result in an increase or a decrease of community dissimilarity depending on the balance of homogenization and heterogenization processes, which are related to management practices among counties.…”

Butterflies Australia: a national citizen science database for monitoring changes in the distribution and abundance of Australian butterflies

“…Fruit baiting has rarely been used (Braby 1995b; Sambhu et al . 2018), mainly because few butterflies in Australia specialise on fermented fruits (Braby 2000). Three studies dealing with threatened species (Braby 2010; Andren & Cameron 2012, 2014; Taylor 2014) mainly focused on mapping the spatial distribution based on occupancy surveys (presence/absence data) and then estimating the occupancy rate, as well as the extent of occurrence and/or area of occupancy.…”

The community characteristics and month dynamics of butterfly at different habitats in the Badagongshan National Nature Reserve

“…宝库" "世界罕见的物种基因库" "天然博物馆"。 蝴蝶隶属于节肢动物门昆虫纲鳞翅目, 对环境 变化较为敏感, 许多种类已被作为生态系统健康状 况 与 气 候 变 化 的 指 示 生 物 (Mullany et al, 2018;Sambhu et al, 2018; 马方舟等, 2018)。 通过对区域内 蝴蝶种群的结构和分布情况进行监测, 能在一定程 度上衡量区域生境质量及生物多样性的变化情况 (Laesen, 1988;Kunte, 1997;Kocher, 2000;Xu et al, 2017 (Morisita, 1959;Horn, 1966) 、 Sørensen 物种相似性指数(C s ) (Sørensen, 1948;张镱锂, 1998)对八大公山蝶类群落β 多样性进行评估, 各指数计算公式如下:…”