Study Of Butterfly Diversity In Fopingnational Nature Researve

In order to explore the butterfly diversity in Foping National Nature Reserve,a total of 50 km long transects were laid in the reserve.All the butterflies were investigated for two consecutive years(2014 and 2015)using transect counts.Menhinick richness index,Shannon-Wiener diversity index and Pielou evenness index were used to evaluate different aspects of butterfly species diversity in Foping Nature Reserve.This study explored species-elevation relationship,analyzed the relationship between species diversity and environment selecting climate and primary productivity as environmental factors and using the generalized linear models to fit the relationship between species data and environmental variables.Further,in order to find how species respond to environmental change in diversity-environment relationship,generalized linear models were also used and climate,primary productivity,vegetation period and land use were selected as environmental variables.In the view of functional diversity this study analyzed responses of butterflies to environment.Transect counts are the important method to butterfly study but lack evaluation outside Europe,this study estimated butterfly saturated richness using rarefaction and extrapolation curves and compared applicability between Europe and Chinese Qin Mountains.244 species of 10131 butterflies belonging to 119 genera of 5 families were recorded and Nymphalidae had the highest diversity.Of all the recorded butterflies,58% came from the Oriental region reaching 141 species,the Palaearctic-Oriental species accounted for about one-third of the total species owing 81 species,only 18 species were in the Palaearctic region,and only 4 were in the widespread species.This reflects the distribution pattern of the main species in the Oriental region supplemented by the species in the Palaearctic region.Chinese endemic species recorded 82 species,but protected species only recorded 3 species;besides,no one was identical.In species-elevation relationship,the study found that the species diversity of butterflies showed a hump-shaped pattern along the elevation gradient.July and August are the two months with the highest butterfly diversity in the reserve.In the relationship between species diversity and environment,the results of the study showed that although the overall butterfly diversity in the reserve was monotonically related to temperature,Satyrinae had a reverse relationship.This result highlight that the extreme vulnerability of Satyrinae to global warming and urgently needs to be protected as a priority in the future.The hump-shaped relationship found in the reserve between butterfly diversity and productivity has been widely reported in the world but the underlying mechanism is still unknown.When temperature and productivity were put into the model together,it is found that only temperature had a significant effect.Therefore,temperature may be the key environmental factor that restricted butterfly species diversity in Foping Reserve.Findings of functional diversity demonstrated that relatively less number of butterflies with large body size could be supported with increase of primary productivity,suggesting energetic trade-off between body size and abundance,and multivoltine butterflies could benefit from long vegetation period.In addition,vegetation period also has different effects on butterflies with different wintering stages and host specialization.Although the diversity of butterflies with different functional traits will increase with the extension of vegetation period,butterflies overwintering with eggs showed a decrease trend,which may be due to the cold resistant,and dry and heat nonresistant.In addition,grass feeding butterflies showed a similar downward trend,possibly due to the fact that grass formed a large part of the habitat in the short vegetation period at high altitudes.In order to further understand the intrinsic relationship between functional traits in response to environmental changes,the study used multivariate analysis to classify species into different ecological groups according to their functional traits,and then used the generalized linear model to explore the response to environmental variables.The study found that niche breadth hypothesis is more suitable for larger species and that voltinism-body size trade-off may only be found in polyphagous butterflies.Most notably,as climate warming intensifies,high-altitude butterflies with restricted niches and egg-wintering species are highly vulnerable to this threat and should,therefore,be protected as a priority.Applicability study found that transect counts had lower efficiency in China.Compared with Spain and Germany,central China is a region with a considerably different biogeographic history and more diverse butterfly fauna resulting in the efficiency of transect counts was much lower in China than in the other two regions.Apart from the fact that traditional transect counts may undersample canopy species which are predominant in central China,higher efficiency in Europe may be primarily attributed to different patterns of butterfly richness likely caused by different biogeographic and anthropogenic land-use history.The results highlight that great caution is needed when transect count methods are transferred to other regions of the world,especially to particularly species rich areas with a high number of rare species.Low detectability of certain species can substantially mask species richness estimates,and this study suggest to carefully adapt sampling effort and perhaps combine transect counts with other methods to ensure more realistic assessment of species richness in such regions.