Dataset Information

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.

SUBMITTER: Sambhu H

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6309007 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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

Sambhu Hemchandranauth H Nankishore Alliea A Turton Stephen M SM Northfield Tobin D TD

Ecology and evolution 20181206 24

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 t ...[more]

PMID: 30619593

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Project description:Land-use changes have dramatically transformed tropical landscapes. We describe an ecological-economic land-use change model as an integrated, exploratory tool used to analyze how tropical land-use change affects ecological and socio-economic functions. The model analysis seeks to determine what kind of landscape mosaic can improve the ensemble of ecosystem functioning, biodiversity, and economic benefit based on the synergies and trade-offs that we have to account for. More specifically, (1) how do specific ecosystem functions, such as carbon storage, and economic functions, such as household consumption, relate to each other? (2) How do external factors, such as the output prices of crops, affect these relationships? (3) How do these relationships change when production inefficiency differs between smallholder farmers and learning is incorporated? We initialize the ecological-economic model with artificially generated land-use maps parameterized to our study region. The economic sub-model simulates smallholder land-use management decisions based on a profit maximization assumption. Each household determines factor inputs for all household fields and decides on land-use change based on available wealth. The ecological sub-model includes a simple account of carbon sequestration in above-ground and below-ground vegetation. We demonstrate model capabilities with results on household consumption and carbon sequestration from different output price and farming efficiency scenarios. The overall results reveal complex interactions between the economic and ecological spheres. For instance, model scenarios with heterogeneous crop-specific household productivity reveal a comparatively high inertia of land-use change. Our model analysis even shows such an increased temporal stability in landscape composition and carbon stocks of the agricultural area under dynamic price trends. These findings underline the utility of ecological-economic models, such as ours, to act as exploratory tools which can advance our understanding of the mechanisms underlying the trade-offs and synergies of ecological and economic functions in tropical landscapes.

Dataset Information

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

Publications

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

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