Habitat conversion affects beta diversity in frugivorous butterfly assemblages

ABSTRACT

Tropical dry forests are diverse ecosystems that are globally threatened but are rarely protected. The main threat to this habitat is conversion for agricultural use. Here we evaluate the effects of environmental conversion, comparing patterns of beta diversity of butterflies in unconverted dry forest ecosystems (protected areas) and in agroecosystems (sugarcane and pasture). Butterflies were collected for 720 traps/day in 2018, using baited traps. Contrary to expectations, temporal beta diversity in sugarcane was higher than in forests. Nevertheless, the community in sugarcane contained mainly generalist species and its temporal dissimilarity was driven mainly by differences in species abundance. As expected, the spatial beta diversity between forest ecosystems and agroecosystems was high. Environmental conversion led to species loss, affecting mainly specialist species, which are more restricted to forest habitats, and resulted in a high degree of nesting of communities in agroecosystems. Our results emphasize the conservation value of protected natural areas and the importance of maintaining such areas as an essential strategy for conserving biodiversity.

KEYWORDS:

• Bioindicator
• dry forests
• protected natural areas

Acknowledgments

We thank the Paulo Gomes, Felipe Tote, Layane Chaves, Macêdo Júnior, Celso, Inácio Meneses, André Pryjma, Marcus Briozo, and Matheus Pinheiro for their help during fieldwork. We thank the André Victor Lucci Freitas for his help in identifying the species. We thank the managers of the forest reserve, pasture, and sugarcane plantations for authorization to perform this work, the Instituto Chico Mendes de Conservação da Biodiversidade (ICMBio) for the collection license (49965393), and the Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Piauí (FAPEPI) for financial support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.